Recently I was unfortunate to spend a day between two hospitals in the United Kingdom. I was fortunate in that I was able to leave at the end of the day. National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in the UK have become the modern day killing fields and especially so if you have reached an advanced age.
In ancient history the main entrance to UK hospitals was littered with smokers and their paraphernalia. Today you are greeted with an alternative scenario comprising brightly coloured posters advertising e cigarettes as a way to give up smoking cigarettes. How the e cigarette (vaping) industry has achieved such a level of influence that they can get the NHS to do all their advertising for them is remarkable. Indeed the promotion of e cigarettes continues on the NHS website. I am confident that such marketing of e cigarettes is prominent in health authorities across the (so-called) developed world.
E cigarettes is already a 30bn dollar industry and largely based upon a premise that they will help people to stop smoking ‘normal’ cigarettes. Recent research suggests that the jury is still out on this so-called benefit. However, evidence is burgeoning that switching from conventional tobacco smoking to e cigarettes is simply exchanging one route of disease for another. Just perhaps for another, a cure, that is significantly worse than the original disease.
We picked up on this aspect of e-cigarettes almost ten years ago now and carried out some simple laboratory tests to establish some facts about e cigarettes and health and specifically with respect to human exposure to aluminium. I have reproduced our limited but useful contribution to this subject below for your perusal and comment.
We called it ‘More to E Cigarettes Than Meets The Eye’ and it was published in the journal Tobacco Control in 2018.
The United Kingdom government is now recommending e-cigarettes as important tools in helping individuals to quit smoking. It is widely acknowledged that, for many, smoking tobacco is detrimental to health. However, it is perhaps less widely appreciated that we have only a limited understanding of why smoking tobacco is bad for our health. Why, for example, might you be 40 times more likely of succumbing to lung cancer if you are a persistent heavy smoker? What is it in tobacco or in the act of smoking which is damaging to health? These are the enigmas of smoking tobacco which have remained largely unanswered. We are interested in the myriad ways that humans are exposed to aluminium in everyday life. Intriguingly one such way is smoking tobacco and the main reason for this is the presence of significant amounts of aluminium in tobacco. When tobacco is smoked its components form an aerosol which is taken down into the lung before it is eventually expired. Anyone who has set up a ‘smoking machine’ to investigate this will no doubt have been impressed by the efficiency with which a surrogate lung fluid transforms the black smoke coming out of the cigarette into the white wispy vapour which is eventually expired. The surrogate lung fluid, on the other hand, changes from a clear solution to one which is tinged with yellow. We found that a significant amount of aluminium (ca 50microgram/L), presumably originating from the tobacco, was retained by the surrogate lung fluid and we speculated that this aluminium could contribute towards tobacco-related illnesses.
The arrival of e-cigarettes encouraged us to repeat our previous experiments. In the first instance we measured the aluminium content of many commercially-available e-liquids. Their aluminium content ranged from 26microgram/L for pure propylene glycol (the usual vehicle for e-liquids) to 147microgram/L (<0.2ppm) for a Virginian e-liquid with high nicotine content. Nevertheless even the higher figure is considerably lower than the aluminium content of tobacco (ca 2.0ppm) and so we were not expecting e-cigarettes to be a significant source of aluminium to lung fluids. However, we were to be surprised! When a 0.5mL volume of e-liquid was ‘smoked’ to completion through 50mL of a surrogate lung fluid the aluminium content of the lung fluid varied between 2000 and 9000microgram/L which equated to between 100 and 500microgram of aluminium per 0.5mL of e-liquid. Further experiments where the branded e-liquid was replaced with propylene glycol (which contains only 26microgram/L aluminium) produced results up to 13000microgram/L aluminium in the surrogate lung fluid, equivalent to approximately 700microgram of aluminium per 0.5mL of propylene glycol vehicle.
Smoking e-cigarettes is potentially much more hazardous with respect to potential toxicity due to aluminium than smoking tobacco. The source of the aluminium is the e-cigarette itself and not the e-liquid though the latter may contribute towards the dissolution of aluminium from various components of the e-cigarette.
We do not know if some of the health-related effects of smoking tobacco are attributable to aluminium in tobacco. However, if they are then such will not be addressed by smoking e-cigarettes.
The promotion of e cigarettes by health authorities such as the NHS in the UK is a scandal and yet another example of ‘health’ policy killing us softly but surely and, of course, making certain that we pay for this by supporting corrupt industries along the way.
new word: Public Hell-th.
I prefer Holistic Healing, it works every time.
Yeah, it's pretty breathtaking and gobsmackingly naive and devoid of the even most cursory knowledge of the history of the tobacco industry to trust them on this (i.e. that vaping is better than conventional smoking).
Can only be that they threw very large sums of money at the health bureaucrats, politicians etc.