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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

The big problem seems to be that vaping has never been proven to be safe or safer than cigarettes. There's always been the assumption that it is.

My suspicion is that something like this outbreak will happen again.

I'm not a fan of the vaping companies since their goal seems to be to get users addicted to their product but they should go through the process of proving that vaping is safer than cigarettes so they don't get blamed for the next outbreak. And cigarette users have a choice that's less harmful than smoking cigarettes.

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Cigarettes kill almost 500,000 people a year in the US alone.

We could have 10 of these "outbreaks" a day and still be way ahead.

It seems like people shouldn’t be equal when in one case it means 50 or 60 year olds dying from a four pack a day habit that they refused to quit after a lifetime of warning and in the other case it’s a teen or young twenty year old that vaped the wrong thing once not really knowing what they were getting into

That assumes there’s no long term cancer risk from vaping, which we simply don’t know yet.

Is there any plausible theoretical basis for a cancer risk from vaping?

Nicotine is a carcinogen

Nicotine is not a carcinogen.

https://thorax.bmj.com/content/66/4/353

https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/21569/Share

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/

Anything I've read on the matter suggests this is not the current understanding, although I've read various theories that it may contribute to the development of cancer.

Do you have any convincing articles you could share?

That 500,000 number includes those who have been smoking for many many years from a wide age range. Also the total number of smokers is also a large number (across years). So it is really not a fair comparison

>Cigarettes kill almost 500,000 people a year in the US alone.

I really feel like such statistics, for other topics as well, are unnecessarily sensationalist. Yes, people are dying from smoking related diseases, but they're not dropping dead from smoking. They smoke (and derive pleasure from doing so) for decades and increase their chances of lung disease. The truth doesn't sound quite as urgent, IMO.

But I do agree with your general sentiment.

Smokers live, on average, 10 years less than non-smokers. That sounds pretty fucking urgent.

Burning carbon chains and directly afterwards ingesting it into the lungs has been proven to be quite bad, it does cell and tissue damage and hinders a healthy cell respiration. Is there any reason we should expect worse effects from vaping which, as I understand it, if done correctly doesn't produce harmful carbons?

There is reason to consider this a possibility, since many molecules may be potentially harmful when inhaled as vapor, with unknown health effects (ie vitamin E acetate), but under combustion would deteriorate mostly or entirely into the carbon forms that have well understood effect on health -- as a previous commenter mentioned, 10yr lifespan reduction from long term continuous cigarette use.

There is just not longitudinal data available for vaporizing plants or synthetic nicotine/thc concentrates. It could be an even higher lifespan reduction than smoking!

> with unknown health effects (ie vitamin E acetate)

The effects of Vitamin E Acetate is actually well known and thoroughly documented. It's just that these black-market producers don't care.

That assumption is there because in the US, things are generally assumed to be safe until proven it isn't. I don't see people asking if the cups they buy are safe to drink from (e.g. many BPA free cups are worse than BPA cups but no one seems to care), or the food they eat. They don't ask for proof their humidifier is safe.

The reason why people are concerned is because vaping is a smoking replacement and people hate smoking in all its forms, safe or not. It's a political thing.

Care to share some info about those dangerous non-BPA cups/plastics?

I don't have any links handy, but there's been a slow stream of articles over the past decade or so talking about how what some companies used to replace BPA have similar or worse chemical characteristics than BPA. There's been studies showing BPA replacements are still bad, including one within the past month, but I don't know the veracity of them.

My general view is that glass has been used for thousands of years and is well understood when compared to plastics. So when I had my kids I bought glass everything. After using glass bottles with 3 kids, only 1 of them ever broke one.

Suggesting that smokers should not vape because its dangers have not been fully established is like suggesting taking the stairs might be dangerous, so you should rather jump out of the window, as we know the dangers of that precisely.

Of course for non-smokers, it's a totally different equation.

I assume many of the effects are long-term and would be hard to quantify in a short-term clinical trial. In that case, what could be done to prove vaping is safer than cigarettes within a reasonable time to market?

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