US
New research funded by British American Tobacco (BAT) has suggested inhaling nicotine vapor could be as safe as breathing air.
To perform its experiments, the tobacco giant teamed up with the MatTek Corporation, which makes models of human cells used in in vitro laboratory experiments. Then scientists used a “smoking robot” to expose these lung cell replicas to tobacco smoke, the vapor from two different brands of e-cigarettes and just plain old air. When exposed to old-fashioned smoke for six hours, the cells died. But after subjecting the cells to an “aggressive and continuous” dose of vapor, researchers claimed the damage to the airway tissue was “similar to that of air”. “By employing a combination of a smoking robot and a lab-based test using respiratory tissue, it was possible to demonstrate.... the e-cigarette aerosols used in this study have no [toxic] effect on human airway tissue,” said BAT spokesperson Dr Marina Murphy. There are now plans to carry out the same tests using the vapor from a wider variety of e-cigarettes to prove its results.
“Currently there are no standards concerning the in vitro testing of e-cigarette aerosols,” said Marina Trani, group head scientific product stewardship at BAT. “Our protocol could prove very useful in helping the process by which these guidelines might progress.”
Dr Michael Siegel, professor in the department of community health sciences at Boston University’s school of public health, called on public health bodies and anti-tobacco groups to encourage smokers to swap to vaping - a step which would “transform the nicotine market and achieve a huge public health victory”. He proclaimed that “such a phenomenon would result in the greatest public health miracle of our lifetimes”.