E-cigs may be cleaner, but not necessarily safer says Mid-Atlanic ALA, timeleader.com (PA) 19 Feb 2014

http://timesleader.com/news/extras/1201037/E-cigs-may-be-cleaner-but-not-necessarily-safer

If it’s Deborah Brown, president and CEO of the American Lung Association of the Mid-Atlantic, the story behind electronic cigarettes isn’t all that rosy.

“No brand has been submitted for evaluation of their safety,” Brown said. “In some initial lab tests in 2009, the (Food and Drug Administration) did find some detectable levels of toxic, cancer-causing chemicals, including an ingredient used in anti-freeze

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The association claims the e-cigarette industry is using marketing tactics of the tobacco industry by using celebrity spokespeople to glamorize its products, making unproven health claims, encouraging smokers to switch instead of quit, and creating candy- and fruit-flavored products to attract youth.

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“We are faced with a deep-pocketed, ever-evolving tobacco industry that’s determined to maintain its market share at the expense of our kids and current smokers,” Brown continued.

ALA opinion on anti tobacco spending by states, Benefits Pro blog, January 27,2014

http://www.benefitspro.com/2014/01/27/lung-association-urges-states-to-spend-more-to-fig

January 27,2014

Meanwhile, the tobacco industry has been throwing a lot of marketing weight behind its latest tobacco-related product, e-cigarettes. These emerging products can be made to look exactly like cigarettes. They use batteries to vaporize nicotine (sometimes with tasty flavors) to give the user a nicotine fix without the tars present in real tobacco. Much of the marketing, the lung association said, is aimed at teenagers.

The association and others have raised concerns that e-cigarette use could lead to nicotine dependency, as well as creating the habit of having a cigarette for social status purposes. These potential outcomes of picking up the habit of e-smoking could lead to the direct use of tobacco, they suggest.

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“We are faced with a deep-pocketed, ever-evolving tobacco industry that’s determined to maintain its market share at the expense of our kids and current smokers,” Harold Wimmer, ALA national president and CEO, said in a statement from the group. “In the absence of any meaningful action by state and federal policymakers, an ever-changing Big Tobacco will continue to gain more customers unless our nation’s leaders step up to fund programs and enact policies proven to make tobacco history.”

ALA and ACS, ABCNews website, 24 Sept 2013

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/facts-cigarettes/story?id=20345463#

For now, the devices remain uncontrolled by any governmental agency, a fact that worries experts like Erika Seward, the assistant vice president of national advocacy for the American Lung Association.

“With e-cigarettes, we see a new product within the same industry — tobacco — using the same old tactics to glamorize their products,” she said. “They use candy and fruit flavors to hook kids, they make implied health claims to encourage smokers to switch to their product instead of quitting all together, and they sponsor research to use that as a front for their claims.”

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However, Seward said because e-cigarettes remain unregulated, it’s impossible to draw conclusions about all the brands based on an analysis of two.

“To say they are all safe because a few have been shown to contain fewer toxins is troubling,” she said. “We also don’t know how harmful trace levels can be.”

Thomas Glynn, the director of science and trends at the American Cancer Society, said there were always risks when one inhaled anything other than fresh, clean air, but he said there was a great likelihood that e-cigarettes would prove considerably less harmful than traditional smokes, at least in the short term.

“As for long-term effects, we don’t know what happens when you breathe the vapor into the lungs regularly,” Glynn said. “No one knows the answer to that.”

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Seward said many of her worries center on e-cigarettes being a gateway to smoking, given that many popular brands come in flavors and colors that seem designed to appeal to a younger generation of smokers.

“We’re concerned about the potential for kids to start a lifetime of nicotine use by starting with e-cigarettes,” she said.