Doctor says electronic cigarettes are 100 to 1000 times safer than cigarettes
April 15, 2010
Dr Laugesen of Health New Zealand, a Christchurch based company, will be celebrating 50 years in the medical profession this year. He started off as a surgeon before switching to public health. Health New Zealand have researched the health risks of electronic cigarette vapour for users.
Dr Laugesen says, “both the nicotine liquid and the vapour shows there is little to worry about.”
He concluded that “inhaling mist from the e-cigarette is rated several orders of magnitude (100 to 1000 times) less dangerous than smoking tobacco cigarettes”.
“It is safer because it works at a much lower temperature,” he says. The temperature at the end of a real cigarette is between 800 and 1000 degrees Celsius, while the liquid in an e-cigarette vaporises at 54 degrees.
“Also, there are only a few chemicals in e-cigarettes compared to the thousands of chemicals in tobacco.”
Electronic cigarettes can be sold in New Zealand only without nicotine. According to ASH New Zealand, some certain supermarkets in Auckland are selling them. However, e-cigarettes with nicotine are can be imported for personal use only.
Dr Laugesen importing e-cigarettes should be controlled, but says regulating e-cigarettes as medicine is too strict. “In New Zealand, for a single strength of medicine it costs around about $100,000 to get registered for one year, and big trials that may cost a million dollars to show a product works as a medicine.” E-cigarette manufacturers do not have those kinds of resources, he says.
In the UK there is currently no restriction on the use of electronic cigarettes. They are exempt from the smoking ban, Health Act.
