Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

More than a decade after electronic cigarettes became broadly available in the U.S., their merits are still being debated.

Do these products help people quit smoking?

Do they carry serious risks that should not be overlooked?

This week, we hear from two tobacco control experts in a two-part series.

In part two today, Professor Stan Glantz, the Truth Initiative Distinguished

Professor of Tobacco Control at the University of California, San Francisco, and the lead

author of a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine Evidence talks with Dr. Josh

Sharfstein. In an epilogue, we'll also hear a personal story from a dual user who describes his smoking cessation journey.

Let's listen.

Professor Stan Glantz, thank you so much for joining me to talk about the health risks associated with electronic cigarettes.

And let me ask why you decided to do this study.

Well, each cigarettes are widely assumed

to be safer than cigarettes.

And the reason for that is the way a cigarette works

is you set the tobacco on fire, and that generates an aerosol of nicotine

that you inhale, and it takes the nicotine to your lungs and then to your brain. In the process of

generating the aerosol, by burning the tobacco, you generate a lot of toxic combustion products. An e-cigarette also delivers

...