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Comment by ptest1 | Hacker News Reader

I believe these vaping cases are from using elicit, underground THC vaping products and not the usual e-cigarette / nicotine vaping we usually associate with the word “vaping.”

There’s some details over on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette/comments/cxov1...

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That thread seems like speculation without much to back it up. Not everyone showing symptoms smoked THC cartridges and the article makes it clear that experts have not yet identified a specific cause

This comment section is also a bunch of speculation without any evidence. Seems to be the same with every other story or conversation about this topic.

>Not everyone showing symptoms smoked THC cartridges

Are we sure about that? The article doesn't seem to say that to me. It also says that patients sometimes lie about what they vape.

Minor quibble: a doctor would write "Patient reported no thc use" not "Patient did not use thc".

Patients are notorious liars

Yeah I wish the article gave more details instead of just spreading FUD

Lethal FUD, as vaping standard PG+VG+nicotine mixtures without adulterants is orders of magnitude safer than smoking.

On what basis do you know this?

People have been vaping for a decade. There is no epidemic of vape-related pulmonary issues anywhere else than in the US right now.

Smoking kills over eight million people every year, 480,000 of them in the US alone.

Even if the current epidemic turns out to be global, vaping is still several orders of magnitude less lethal.

Given how long smoking was deemed to be safe, what studies have you seen that show that vaping hasn't and won't turn out to have long term health effects on par with smoking? A decade is not a very long time to run the kind of large scale longitudinal studies that are needed to accurately gauge long term health effects. Making significant claims about the long term safety of e-cigs without this data seems quite irresponsible.

Edit: lots of downvotes but still nobody actually willing to provide evidence for these ridiculous "several orders of magnitude safer" claims.

It’s so strange to me how vaping is seen as this miraculous thing and any criticism is seen as being a hater.

10 years is not nearly long enough to measure long term health effects, sorry. Being “safer than cigs” isn’t worth anything at all.

Possible reasons were discussed in https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbrie... (transcript coming later AFAICT). Basically: libertarians and tobacco lobby groups.

It's worth a lot if people vape over smoking cigarettes. It's worth negative if people who wouldn't otherwise smoke cigs take up vaping.

More complex question would be if I vape my dessert flavor with or without nicotine is that better for me than eating said dessert? I have had so many people tell me how they 'cant resist' sweets, and I'd rather vape my cake.

A lot of the resistance you describe comes from the fact that vaping is illegal in many countries (interestingly, smoking is legal in almost all of those places) and people living in places where vaping is legal, are concerned that there might be a push towards prohibition.

I agree with you that the amount of evidence we have is not conclusive and if you browse the various vaping forums online, you can see that most vapers openly admit that as well, the problem arises when the lack of conclusive evidence is used as an argument in favour of prohibition, that is what drives many vapers to respond.

In other words, if something is “possibly harmful but we’re not sure yet”, is that a sufficient reason for making it illegal? Most vapers think that the answer is no.

> people living in places where vaping is legal, are concerned that there might be a push towards prohibition

Spreading false, misleading information doesn't help legitimize your cause.

> the problem arises when the lack of conclusive evidence is used as an argument in favour of prohibition, that is what drives many vapers to respond

I haven't see anyone here doing that, I certainly haven't.

> In other words, if something is “possibly harmful but we’re not sure yet”, is that a sufficient reason for making it illegal? Most vapers think that the answer is no.

I do not thing there is any doubt that vaping is harmful to some degree (that appears to be the scientific consensus). The unresolved questions are "how harmful?" and "is it a net negative for society?". However, even if the answers are "almost as harmful as cigarettes" and "yes, it increases public health risks overall despite reductions in smoking", I still would not support banning e-cigs (though I would support advertising restrictions).

I wasn’t replying to you, not sure why you feel the need to resort to personal attacks.

Before I switched from smoking 12-ish years ago my lungs would physically hurt in the morning and I would cough when I woke up. To me, and other people who legitimately view vaping as something that was life-changing in a very positive way that comes off as a very uncaring attitude. Vaping dramatically improved my health.

From EPA "Propylene glycol and dipropylene glycol were first registered in 1950 and 1959, respectively, by the FDA for use in hospitals as air disinfectants. At one point, there were approximately 190 pesticide chemical companies having active propylene or dipropylene glycol registrations." This entire report details safety information, including aerosol use for almost 70 years.

https://archive.epa.gov/pesticides/reregistration/web/pdf/pr...

Another related Glycol saves sick infants from infection and no long-term sequelae reported: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.37.11...

Vegetable Glycerin: https://monq.com/science/vegetable-glycerin/

The more research you do on pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics the more the 96% less harmful than smoking figure appears likely to be in the correct ballpark for harm-reduction vs smoking. Source: https://pneumonia.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41479-...

Smoking tobacco is remarkably dangerous. It would be surprising for vaping to be anywhere near as dangerous as smoking tobacco, especially because you don't have the tar.

I agree in that I would also be surprised to find out that smoking is overall safer than vaping. (Though I do suspect there are certain risks that are still higher with vaping while others are lower than with smoking)

Claiming that vaping is orders of magnitude safer than smoking, without proof, is still highly irresponsible. We simply don't know how safe vaping is.

The history of making safety claims about addictive products is quite fraught with delibratly misleading and false statements. Please take care not to exacerbate this.

We simply don't know how safe vaping is.

Why do you say this so categorically?

"...[R]ats were nose-only exposed to filtered air, nebulized vehicle (saline), or three concentrations of PG/VG mixtures, with and without nicotine...Compared with vehicle exposure, the PG/VG aerosols showed only very limited biological effects with no signs of toxicity."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28882640

Propylene glycol has been used as a carrier for pulmonary inhalers as well as in food and cosmetics for decades.

While there is evidence showing the short term safety of inhalation, there is no evidence as to the long term effects of consistent repeated exposure.

> Propylene glycol has been used as a carrier for pulmonary inhalers as well as in food and cosmetics for decades.

Propylene glycol was deemed safe for oral consumption, not inhalation. I have not seen any sources of information indicating its use in pulmonary inhalers, do you have some sources you can link?

s/inhalers/nebulizers/

See, e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12425745

It's also listed as approved as an inactive ingredient by the FDA, including for inhalation:

  PROPYLENE GLYCOL | RESPIRATORY (INHALATION) | LIQUID   | 57556 | 6DC9Q167V3 | 10%w/w
  PROPYLENE GLYCOL | RESPIRATORY (INHALATION) | SOLUTION | 57556 | 6DC9Q167V3 | 25%w/w

Source: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cder/iig/index.cfm?ev..., page 39.

One way of knowing this would be by reading studies conducted by the national health organisations of several countries, see my other comment in this thread.

The one study says that current best estimates place vaping at ~20x safer, or a single order of magnitude. The other provides no concrete numbers.

There appears to be a lot of dispute about those numbers are unrealisticlly high and concerns about conflicts of interest. The wikipedia article provides lots of references on those disputes:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_electronic_cigarette...

Specifically, the study itself states "A limitation of this study is the lack of hard evidence for the harms of most products on most of the criteria"

Specifically, the study itself states "A limitation of this study is the lack of hard evidence for the harms of most products on most of the criteria"

You could apply the same assessment to strawberries, no? Can't estimate the harm caused by something for which we don't have evidence of harm.

It is unclear what your point is. Did somebody claim that strawberries are orders of magnitudes safer than cigarettes?

My point is that there are good reasons to view the number presented in that report as very preliminary and unreliable.

> safer than smoking.

The problem is that vaping is NOT safer than NOT smoking.

The issue is that vaping is seen as "absolutely safe" rather than "relatively safer". Since vaping is now seen as "cool" (look at the "Game of Thrones" stars being shown vaping--especially the attractive, young women), it is converting non-smoking, non-vaping people into vapers.

That's a problem.

Whereas people on Reddit have no bias at all? Why is it FUD? Why do we equally blindly believe "oh, no, this is all Chinese tainted shit - 'real' vape cartridges are all goodness and light"?

If you're coming from the oversimplified perspective that things are always horribly evil or "goodness and light", then sure. But you have to understand that many of us here are different in that we're capable of understanding nuance, and that facts and details matter in building a model of a complex world.

The health effects of vaping still aren't settled science, but that doesn't make these article any less FUD: The fact that headlines like this and others are eliding the critical fact that the cases they describe are limited to bootleg cartridges is pretty much a central case of FUD.

The Reddit article there _literally_ describes it as "our wonderful alternative".

The reddit post links to this article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/as-vaping-related-lung...

Where in my comment am I saying anything about the Reddit post? The GP comment by mastazi says "I wish the article gave more details instead of spreading FUD", you responded with a complete non sequitur about people who assume legitimate products are risk-free, and I pointed out that disliking FUD doesn't automatically mean you're Pollyannaish about the risks of legitimate products.

Again, what I'm trying to explain to you is that for some of us, there are more than two possible positions here. Mastazi complaining about FUD in a WaPo article (or the original nyt one posted here) doesn't mean he agrees with a random Reddit commenter who also disagrees with the article.

Well, some of us have been vaping (in the traditional sense - nicotine/PG/VG) since those people in the article were in kindergarten. This kind of problem hasn't been a thing until recently.

And the article specifically mentioned this.

Having an article titled "Mysterious [XXX] illness" is pretty much the dictionary definition of FUD but even if you can't accept that, the national health organisations of UK[1] and New Zealand[2] have conducted studies about vaping, you can find a lot of data there (something that can't be said about the NYT article).

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-le...

[2] https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/preventative-health-well...

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