Daily Archives: May 18, 2023

By Siba Jackson, news reporter

Thursday 18 May 2023 05:53, UK

The number of children trying out vaping has risen by 50% in the past year as campaigners call for a crackdown to "stem the tide of child vape experimentation".

Experimental vaping among 11 to 17-year-olds in Britain increased from 7.7% to 11.6%, the data showed.

While the number of children who admitted trying vaping once or twice has roughly doubled in the past nine years, from 5.6% in 2014 to 11.6% this year.

The figures are based on a survey of 2,656 young people conducted in March and April this year by YouGov for charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).

They will be submitted as part of the government's call for evidence on measures to lower the number of children who vape - but also ensure e-cigarettes can be accessed by adults who want to stop smoking.

When asked why they vape, 40% of children surveyed said they just wanted to give them a try, with 19% admitting they wanted to join in with others and a further 14% saying they liked the flavours.

Although it is illegal to sell vaping devices to people under 18, there are numerous social media posts from teenagers discussing flavours such as pink lemonade, strawberry, banana and mango.

It follows earlier warnings from experts that the new generation of disposable vapes - which are known as "puff bars" and contain nicotine - have flooded the market.

The use of disposable devices among children who vape has soared from just 7.7% in 2021 to 69% in 2023, the research found.

They are most commonly bought at corner shops, followed by petrol stations and online.

'Child-friendly promotion' of cheap and attractive products

An increased number of children said they were aware of vaping promotions in shops, rising from 37% last year to 53% this year.

They also noted adverts for vaping on buses and social media platforms, with almost half of those surveyed citing promotions on TikTok.

Some 29% saw them on YouTube, 28% on Instagram and 24% on Facebook, the research found.

ASH chief executive Deborah Arnott said: "We need to stem the tide of child vape experimentation and the government's investment in a crackdown on illegal underage sales of vapes is a vital first step.

"But enforcement on its own won't do the trick without tougher regulation to address the child-friendly promotion of these cheap and attractive products.

"The evidence is clear, government needs to take strong action to prevent the marketing of vapes to children."

Dad Geoff Worsley, from Abergele, North Wales, launched a petition entitled Stop Children Vaping - More Regulation Now, which has received more than 100,000 signatures.

He is calling on the government to introduce tougher regulation immediately.

"Parents like me up and down the country are calling on the government to act to protect our children from vaping as well as smoking," Mr Worsley said.

"More funding for enforcement is a good first step, but it's not enough.

"Vaping is safer and better for smokers than smoking, but it shouldn't be promoted to children.

"Regulations are needed to prevent vapes being openly sold in prominent positions within shops, in brightly coloured packaging and sweet names attractive to kids."

Read more: Government unveils plans for 'illegal vape enforcement squads'More than four million Brits use e-cigarettes - but 350,000 have never smoked

This is a limited version of the story so unfortunately this content is not available. Open the full version

Misconceptions over vaping

ASH said fears that vaping is leading to a new generation addicted to nicotine are not justified by the current evidence.

The data showed most of the 20.5% of young people who have ever vaped have only tried it once or twice, the charity said.

Some vape less than once a week and others no longer do so.

This is a limited version of the story so unfortunately this content is not available. Open the full version

Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts

Just 2% of children surveyed said they vape daily.

Some 63% who tried vaping once or twice had never smoked.

But 71% of those who currently vape have tried smoking.

Professor of tobacco addictions at Kings College London, Ann McNeill, said a "well-funded communications campaign" was necessary to address "growing misconceptions" over vaping.

"These misconceptions are likely to encourage children to believe that they might as well smoke as vape, and discourage adults who smoke but have never vaped from taking up the government's 'swap to stop' offer (using vapes instead of cigarettes)," she said.

The new data showed no significant change since last year in the number of children smoking - which dropped from 4.8% to 3.6% in 2023.

The children who say they currently vape rose slightly from 6.9% last year to 7.6% this year.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: "It's already illegal to sell vapes to children and we are exploring further ways to tackle youth vaping through our newly launched call for evidence, which will look at the appearance and characteristics of vapes, the marketing and promotion of vapes, and the role of social media."

Read the original:

Number of children trying vaping rises 50% in a year in 'tide of experimentation' - Sky News

E-cigarettes

Rise of disposable e-cigarettes has focused regulators around the world on what they fear is an explosion of vaping among young people

The vaping industry turns 20 this year, but Ira Simeonidis fears the golden age of e-cigarettes is already wafting away. Its a bit destroyed, says the organiser of Hall of Vapes, Europes largest vaping trade fair, held in Stuttgart this month.

His festival once drew more than 20,000 visitors, who attended talks, partied with DJs and browsed rows of exhibits by renowned designers showing off their latest mods, elaborately crafted devices for inhaling nicotine and other substances of choice.

It was for professional and passionate vapers, Simeonidis says. A community thing, to get together, drink beer, vape and see each other once a year.

But no more. While the festival was suspended for two years during the Covid-19 pandemic, the vaping world transformed. Markets around the world have been flooded with mass-produced disposable vapes, and a product that was once the province of speciality stores now fills the racks of corner shops, mobile-phone accessory stands and booths hawking tourist tat.

The number of designers exhibiting at his fair more than halved this year, Simeonidis says. There were no concerts, and many of his stalls were taken up by companies selling disposable technology. Theyre cheaper and its catastrophic for the environment with their lithium batteries, he laments. Also, there are the kids.

The rise of disposables has not only upset vaping purists. It is has intensified the focus of regulators around the world on what they fear is an explosion of vaping among young people, including school-age children, enticed by dark marketing of the products by social media influencers and kid-friendly flavours like crme brle, sour sherbet and Swedish fish.

Data on the surge is still emerging, but a survey of British children found the proportion who vape more than doubled in the year to 2022, while the use of disposables soared by 600%. Both those trends were largely among children who were already smokers, though studies from Australia, New Zealand and the US suggest more significant numbers of teenagers who vape in those countries might have never touched traditional cigarettes.

Another way to measure the explosive growth of disposables is the flood of candy-coloured cartridges that now scatter the surroundings of many universities and schools. A guy who picks up litter told me he thought they were highlighters and students were getting very studious in the parks, says Freddie Dawson, a Dublin-based editor at Tamarind Intelligence, a firm that tracks the industry.

You just need to walk down the street and see what [vapes] young people are using its always, always going to be disposables.

Even as debate continues over whether vapes are a life-saving tool to wean smokers off cigarettes, or an avenue for the nicotine industry to hook a new generation of addicts and they may be both concern over teenage use and the environmental toll of the devices is driving a new wave of regulation around the world.

Australia has announced that it will impose the strongest restrictions of any developed market, completely banning recreational vaping while limiting the sale of the devices to pharmacies and only with a doctors prescription.

Other countries are unlikely to go that far, Dawson says, but many are tightening their own regimes, inching closer to treating vapes the way they do cigarettes. The Netherlands banned flavoured vapes this year, while France says it could prohibit disposable vapes by the end of 2023. In Ireland, children under 18 can legally buy vapes from any store a loophole the Irish parliament is moving to close.

New Zealand has implemented a world-first generational smoking ban, preventing anyone currently aged 14 and under from legally buying cigarettes for the rest of their lives. More Kiwi adults vape (8.3%) than smoke (8%) according to the latest data, but as elsewhere, that growth is particularly strong among young people. Vaping rates among 14- to 15-year-olds have tripled, and legislators are spooked.

As some doctors and health groups call for a tougher stance, New Zealands government is re-examining its regulations. Associate health minister Ayesha Verrall, who has fronted many of the smoking changes, admitted in January that youth vaping rates are too high and the government need[s] to strike a better balance.

The UK is holding an awkward pose, trying to curb what one expert has claimed is an epidemic of use by children, while at the same time offering vape starter kits to English smokers in recognition that its own commissioned research says vaping is not danger-free, but poses a small fraction of the risks of smoking in the short and medium term.

Estimates of the number of people who vape around the world vary wildly, from 40m to more than twice that many, with the majority thought to be in rich or upper-middle income countries where, even with the imposition of new duties, vaping is still cheaper than smoking heavily taxed cigarettes.

But as the price of vapes has fallen, the devices have proliferated in less wealthy countries such as South Africa, Malaysia and the dozens of others where regulations are nascent, and lawmakers are starting to voice similar worries over their use by adolescents.

In China, where most of the worlds vapes are manufactured, flavours other than tobacco were banned in 2022, in recognition of their apparent danger to children though exporting those same flavoured products to the rest of the world is still permitted, and booming.

India was four years ahead of Australia in banning vapes outright, but its experience raises another question for lawmakers: how effectively can vapes be regulated? A survey published this year of young Indians found more than one in five had vaped at least once, despite the ban, with another fifth intending to try it in the next year.

The sale of e-cigarettes is rampant, and its sale by home deliveries and through the internet is extensive, says Monika Arora, a vice-president of the Public Health Foundation of India. Our work with school students is showing theyre experimenting from a very young age, class 8 [age 13-14] onwards.

Governments are likely to confront similar challenges as they seek to claw vapes back from the hands of young people. Ban specific flavours, for example, and manufacturers may tweak their recipes slightly to circumvent the rules. Prohibit vapes completely, and the black market is likely to live on as it does for any drug. Its a game of whack-a-mole, says Dawson.

Enthusiasts may believe the golden age of e-cigarettes is over. But the vaping era, with all the fraught questions it coughs up, is only beginning.

This article was amended on 17 May 2023 to clarify that Australias tough measures against recreational vaping have been announced but are not yet law. Also, the embedded world map has been updated to reflect recent legislation banning public vaping in Taiwan.

Additional reporting from Tess McClure

{{topLeft}}

{{bottomLeft}}

{{topRight}}

{{bottomRight}}

{{.}}

Visit link:

Vaping boom and bust: from bans to starter kits, how the world is responding - The Guardian

ALBANY Almost a fourth of high schoolers in New York are vaping inhaling nicotine or the marijuana component THC through an electronic cigarette a sea change from two decades ago when a quarter of students smoked traditional tobacco cigarettes.

Schools across the state are being forced to invent ways to stop the growing trend, which is easier to hide because the smell and look of tobacco smoke is gone, while trying to get students to understand that nicotine is still addictive no matter how it's ingested.

While the mode of inhaling is different, school officials are up against what feels like the same enemy: marketing that suggests vaping is cool, delicious (with dessert and fruit flavors) and totally safe.

The electronic cigarette, which is commonly called a vape, vape pen or mod,can be smaller than a lighter. Some look like aUSB charger or pen. Theyre so tiny that administrators report some students will take a hit during class and then try to hide their device.

Avape pen works by having a battery inside that heats up liquid and turns it into a mist. While there is a visible smoke from exhalingvape, it tends to dissipate faster than traditional cigarette smoke. It does, however, have an odor depending on what kindof vape it is.

(School administrators can search a student if they have reasonable cause, such as a sudden mist cloud appearing over the students desk.)

One in 10 middle and high school students nationwide say they vape regularly, according to the annual youth tobacco survey run by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But it's worse in New York, where 22 percent of high school students said they usevapes, according to a 2020 survey.

Vaping has nearly replaced cigarettes. Traditional smoking among teens is at an all-time low in the state. In New York's last survey, only two percent of high school students said they smoke cigarettes regularly a 91 percent decline in the youth smoking rate since 2000, when 27 percent of high school students said they were regular smokers.

Catching students with vapes is so difficult to stop that schools have reverted to what they used to do to crack down on smokers: Theyre locking bathrooms.

InScotia-Glenville, a rotating selection of bathrooms are opened at the high school each day. A hall monitor is posted outside the unlockedbathrooms andthe rest are locked. At Shenendehowa, a parent reported that her high school son was patted down by a monitor before he could enter the bathroom, to make sure he wasnt bringing in a vape.

InBallston Spa, administrators installed vape detectors in February. The detectors, placed in the bathrooms, look like smoke detectors. They send an email alert to administrators when they detect nicotine vapor, marijuana vapor or loud noises that sound like destruction. Then the administrators plays back the video from a camera outside the bathroom to determine the possible culprit.

Customers must be 21 to buy avape in New York, and the state banned the sale of flavored vapes in 2020. But administrators say they are still commonly confiscating fruit-flavoredvapes in schools. Online, they can still be bought on Amazon and other websites, many of which do not require buyers to prove their age.

Its a nightmare for administrators who see a new technology repeating the marketing that cigarette companies used for decades to get customers addicted.

One of the really distressing things is theyre so clearly marketed to kids, saidScotia-Glenville High School Principal Peter Bednarek, referring to the fruit, candy and dessert flavors.

Nearly allvape liquid has nicotine, except for some of the THC liquids, according to tests cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. THC is a main component in marijuana. But when the CDC asked adolescents about a popular vape brand, two-thirds of them didnt know the brands liquid had nicotine.

Vapes with THC are now sold legally to those 21 and older in New York. But unlike nicotine vapes, which are sold in gas stations and corner stores, obtaining cannabis vapes from a dispensary requires a person to have their license scanned.

Bednarek can remember when he had to stop underage cigarette smokers, who often believed smoking wasn't that bad. Now its happening again, he said.

This generation of teenagers, in my opinion, is fairly health conscious. They view this as a healthy alternative, he said. They would not have so universally switched over from smoking cigarettes if they did not see it as somehow lesser of a problem. I think many of them think it is not addictive.

Vaping can lead to lung injuries, with symptoms like coughing and shortness of breath, similar to the effects of smoking, according to the CDC.

The vapor is also not harmless. It often contains heavy metals and a chemical that is known to cause lung cancer, according to theCDC.

InWatervliet, school administrators are trying to get that message across when they catch a student vaping. On the first offense, the student can be assigned to do a research project about the health effects of vaping. The project must be presented to their parents, teachers and administrators.

Ballston Spa has tried that, too.

Education is key, said SuperintendentGianleo Duca. But someone who unfortunately is addicted to it, its not going to help.

They try to get those students into cessation programs.

Vaping marijuana has also become popular, he said.

Were now seeing more THC, and its such a high concentration of THC, he said.

InScotia-Glenville High School, the school resource officer will help test vapes, Bednarek said, adding that many of the vapes he confiscates have THC.

Students atScotia-Glenville who get caught with a nicotine vape are usually suspended for a couple days; if the vape has marijuana, the suspension starts at five days.

But testingvapes has led, somewhat predictably, to another problem.

They get flushed down the toilet,Duca said. They clog it, cause all kinds of maintenance, its a huge nuisance.

See the article here:

New York schools struggle to contain teen vaping - Times Union

Health Analysis

Posted: May 17, 2023

New national data shows the number of Canadian teenagers regularly using e-cigarettes ranks among the highest in the world, and experts say a lack of action from the federal government and the widespread availability of flavoured vapes is fuelling a growing crisis.

The latest results from Health Canada'sCanadian Student Tobacco, Alcohol and Drugs Survey, which surveyed 61,096 teenagers in grades 7 to 12 from nine provinces between September 2021 and June 2022, found that 29 per cent of Canadian students had ever tried an e-cigarette.

That number is down slightly overall in Canada, from 34 per cent in 2018-19, but is higher in older age groups with 41 per cent of students in grade 10 to 12 ever having vaped.

Regular use of e-cigarettes also continues to be widespread in Canada, with 17 per cent of students having used an e-cigarette in the past month, down slightly from 20 per cent in 2018-19, but is again higher in grades 10 to 12 with over 24 per cent being monthly users.

Daily vaping rates wereeight per cent across all students surveyed and close to 12 per cent among those in grades 10 to 12 which experts say are some of the highest ever reported globally.

"The numbers have confirmed that Canada has one of the highest youth vaping rates in the world, especially as it relates to daily vaping," said David Hammond, a public health professor at the University of Waterloo and a leading Canadian youth vaping researcher.

"We've essentially plateaued at historically high levels of daily vaping this is maybe the best indication out there that we're in for a long haul of regular youth vaping we've crossed the threshold of this being a fad."

WATCH | Australia cracks down on youth vaping asCanada stalls on national regulation:

Show more

The numbers are higher than they were five years ago, when just 10 per cent of students had used an e-cigarette in the past 30 days and 11 per cent reported daily use in 2016-2017 signalling a growing problem showing no signs of slowing down.

The new youth vaping survey data also partially predates the widespread availability of disposable vapes that came onto the market last year and hold thousands of pre-loaded puffs, don't require refilling or cartridges and are linked to a surge in youth vaping.

"We're very concerned by the long-term issue that e-cigarette use by teenagers continues to be very high unacceptably high," said Rob Cunningham, senior policy analyst at the Canadian Cancer Society.

"And we need the federal government to move immediately to ban flavoured e-cigarettes, a factor that is contributing to these high rates."

When asked what flavour they preferred, the survey showed 63 per cent of students in grades 7 to 12 who vaped in the past month had used a fruit flavour most often.

"There is no doubt that flavours are a very big part of youth vaping they appeal to kids, they're one of the reasons why they start trying vaping in the first place, and fruit flavours and candy flavours are a big part of that," said Hammond.

"The main reason adults vape is to help them quit or not to die from smoking flavours has a much bigger relative influence in youth vaping than it does for adults."

In contrast, youth cigarette smoking rates have continued to drop significantly in Canada with just 14 per cent of Canadian high school students reporting ever having had a cigarette, down from 19 per cent in 2018-19, and only one per cent smoking daily.

"We have seen over time some decreases in youth smoking. That's because of high taxes, high prices, plain packaging and menthol bans," Cunningham said.

"But unfortunately, overall nicotine use when you include both smoking and e-cigarettes, is going up We have an enormous problem, a new generation is becoming addicted to nicotine and we need government action immediately to respond to that."

The federal government sounded the alarm in June 2021 over a "rapid increase in youth vaping in Canada" and proposed changes to the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act to regulate the sale of "desirable flavours" helping drive the rising use among teens.

But two years later, as experts have noted, Canada still has some of the highest rates of youth vaping in the world and little action has been taken to regulate flavours at a national level.

"Health Canada is aware ofand very concerned about the high rate of youth vaping in Canada," a spokespersonsaid in an emailed statement to CBC News,adding they are still reviewing feedback from their public consultations on flavoured vapes, whichended in September 2021.

Vaping has been marketed as an effective way to quit smoking, but e-cigarettes have never been approved as smoking cessation aids in Canada.

The federal government's proposal to restrict e-cigarettes flavours such as cereal milk, cotton candy, "unicorn milk" and "dragon's blood" was expected to help make vaping products "less appealing to youth" while still giving adults trying to quit smoking some flavour options.

But experts and health advocates say Health Canada seems to have shelved the proposal, walked away from further regulating flavours that appeal to youth and left it up to the industry and provinces to take action.

In the absence of national regulations, multiple territories and provinces have taken action, with Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Quebec now banning the sale of most e-cigarette flavours, in an effort to curb youth vaping.

Health Canada did create new regulations on the amount of nicotine allowed in e-cigarettes, setting a maximum nicotine concentration of 20 milligrams per millilitre as of July 2021. But it has not enforced any regulations on flavours.

"The reason we're not seeing much lower rates of vaping in those provinces, is that the flavour restriction is not having any effect on their access," said Cynthia Callard, the executive director of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada.

"It's only with federal action, that the provincial restrictions will be effective It's deeply disturbing that Health Canada is effectively sitting on its hands while this problem continues at such a high level."

Adam Miller Senior Health Writer

Adam Miller is a senior health writer with CBC News. He's covered health and medical science news extensively in Canada for over a decade, in addition to several years reporting on crime, politics and current affairs throughout Asia.

View post:

Canada has some of the highest teen vaping rates in the world, new data shows - CBC.ca