The number of e-cigarette users throughout the nation, many of them teenagers, stricken by a mysterious and acute lung illness has more than doubled in just the past week.
More than 450 people have been hospitalized with serious respiratory distress and six people died. Public health officials still don’t know the cause.
That’s the bad news. The silver lining is that this mystery illness lit a fire under the Food and Drug Administration, which was moving at a glacial pace in deciding whether and how to regulate e-cigarettes, even as their popularity exploded among teenagers. Last year, the annual National Youth Tobacco Survey reported a 78% increase in vaping among high school students. The growth this year is expected to be equally high.
The day after the sixth death was reported, President Donald Trump announced his administration plans to remove flavored e-cigarettes from the market because “people are dying.”
There’s no evidence at the moment that the addition of flavorings to the e-cigarette liquid is responsible for this deadly lung disease. Maybe it’s unrelated; maybe it’s a factor in, or even the cause of, the outbreak.
At this point, however, the evidence is pointing elsewhere.
Investigators are looking at whether the use of Vitamin E oil in the after-market modification of e-cigarette pods by people vaping THC might be the culprit. Inhaling oil is extremely damaging to the lungs. To be safe, public health officials are cautioning people against vaping anything until they know for sure.
And even if flavored nicotine isn’t the villain here, it’s still doing considerable harm by attracting kids to these products. The appeal of such flavorings to kids is why the FDA prohibited the makers of traditional cigarettes from using flavors other than menthol in 2009.
And if you want to keep kids away from vaping and whatever it is that’s putting people in the hospital, making e-cigarettes less appealing is a strategy that studies indicate could work. Nearly 80% of teens who reported vaping said they tried flavors first.
While it’s too bad that it took a serious disease to mobilize the FDA into taking steps public health officials and organizations such as the American Lung Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids have urged for years, this should be a welcomed action, assuming Trump follows through.
Alex Azar, secretary of HHS, the FDA’s parent agency, said Wednesday in no uncertain terms that flavored vaping products would be gone soon and rules would be released in a matter of weeks. Further, he warned that “if we find that children are being attracted to tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes, if we find that manufacturers are marketing the tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes to children or placing them in settings where they get them, we will take enforcement action there also.”
Hopefully this move does not discourage state and local governments from moving forward with their own crackdowns on flavored tobacco products, however. For one thing, the FDA’s ban does not include flavored cigarillos and smokeless tobacco; for another, we’ve seen enough reversals from this president not to put all our faith in one announcement on an otherwise slow news day.
— Los Angeles Times