WHO Wants To Ban Indoor Use Of E-Cigarettes
The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a long-awaited report on electronic cigarettes that calls for regulation of the devices and their contents, as well as bans on indoor use, advertising and sales to minors.
WHO urges a range of regulatory options, including prohibiting e-cigarette makers from making health claims – such as that they help people quit smoking– until they provide “convincing supporting scientific evidence and obtain regulatory approval”.
The report says “legal steps should be taken to end use of e-cigarettes indoors in public and work places. Evidence suggests that exhaled e-cigarette aerosol increases the background air level of some toxicants, nicotine and particles”. And those with fruit, sweet and alcoholic drinks flavours should be banned, it said, while vending machines should be removed in almost all locations.
Professor John Ashton from the UK Faculty of Public Health agrees with the ban: “There are scientists in America who are studying the second hand effects of tobacco smoke who are raising these issues now about e-cigarettes. We really can’t allow these things to get established before we really know what the long-term effects are going to be.”
WHO declared war on “big tobacco” a decade ago, setting up the WHO framework convention on tobacco control, the world’s first public health treaty, which has been ratified by 179 states since coming into force in 2005.
However Professor Gerry Stimson, of Imperial College London and public health campaign group Knowledge-Action-Change, accused the WHO of ‘cherry-picking’ the science.
He said it was “exaggerating the risks of e-cigarettes, while downplaying the huge potential of these non-combustible low-risk nicotine products to end the epidemic of tobacco-related disease”.
“WHO claims e-cigarettes are a threat to public health, but this statement has no evidence to support it, and ignores the large number of people who are using them to cut down or quit smoking completely,” he added.