Is vaping safe?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2019
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After deaths in the US and bans around the world, how risky are e-cigarettes? In some countries, smokeless cigarettes are all the rage. In the UK, doctors say if smokers switch from tobacco to e-cigarettes, it will save lives. But in the US, where the authorities are investigating an outbreak of lung injury linked to vaping, they’re advising vapers to consider stopping. In India, Mexico and dozens of other countries, vaping is banned altogether. It’s a confused international picture.
Vaping is still relatively new and scientists are still researching how harmful it may be in the long-term. What we do know is that every year, eight million people die worldwide as a consequence of smoking tobacco. What are the potential health risks associated with vaping? We’ll find out from our expert witnesses, who include a neuroscientist, a pulmonary critical care doctor and a professor of nicotine and tobacco studies.
(A young woman smoking an electronic cigarette at the vape shop. Credit: Getty images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the inquiry on the BBC World Service. I'm Neil Riselle. |
| 0:04.0 | Each week, four expert witnesses answer one question from the news. Seema Herman told her dad to hurry. She was having trouble breathing. I need a hospital, she said. |
| 0:21.6 | I told my dad go fast don't let me close my eyes or fall asleep because I won't wake up. |
| 0:28.0 | Her lungs were failing. |
| 0:31.0 | Doctors in Los Angeles quickly placed the 18 year old into a medically induced coma. |
| 0:36.0 | Not long after she woke, a photo of her went viral. |
| 0:39.0 | With a tube still pumping oxygen into her, she held up a message saying, |
| 0:43.6 | I want to start a no vaping campaign. |
| 0:47.5 | Sima had been a heavy vapor or user of smokeless e-cigarettes. |
| 0:52.3 | Reporters from all over the world rushed for interviews. or user of smokeless e-cigarettes. |
| 0:52.6 | Reporters from all over the world rushed for interviews. |
| 0:55.9 | But when she claimed that vaping was worse than smoking, |
| 0:59.3 | at least one media outlet had to take down her story. It also emerged she'd been vaping cannabis. Today |
| 1:06.7 | we're asking is vaping safe. Part 1. Dream Delivery. One, dream delivery. |
| 1:25.0 | The story of the modern e-cigarette starts in China in 2003 with this man. |
| 1:33.0 | He's Han Lick. |
| 1:41.0 | Han Lick is a pharmacist from China whose dad passed away from a tobacco associated illness. |
| 1:50.0 | And Han Lick himself had never been able to quit smoking. |
| 1:54.0 | And he had a dream one night where there was a lot of vapor around him. |
| 1:58.6 | And he got up the next day and started working on the modern e-cigarette design. And so what he envisioned was a way to deliver nicotine via the lungs and a way that would be satisfying for smokers and yet he was aiming for harm-free or at least to reduce the |
| 2:17.7 | harm of inhaling nicotine. Hanlick's work would eventually change the life of our first expert witness, Laura Crotty Alexander, |
| 2:31.2 | an associate professor of medicine at the University of California in San Diego. |
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