- E-cigarettes contain harmful cancer-causing chemicals, islanders have been warned
- The cigarette alternatives have boomed in popularity in recent years
- Fears that they may be a gateway to smoking
- Should e-cigarettes have an age limit? Take our poll below
ISLANDERS should not use e-cigarettes because they could contain harmful cancer-causing chemicals, the head of health improvement has said.
The Public Health Department have said that they will be monitoring the use of e-cigarettes and would support any moves to stop under-18s from buying them.
Vape was chosen as the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2014.
Usage of the word, which is defined as to ‘inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device’, more than doubled over the course of the year.
Despite only entering the mainstream lexicon recently, vaping has actually been around since the 1980s, when companies first began experimenting with smokeless cigarettes,
Other contenders included words such as slacktivism, bae, and indyref.
A UK report which showed that nearly 20% of teenagers in the north-west of England had used the products, prompting fears that vaping – the term used for smoking e-cigarettes – could act as a gateway to smoking normal cigarettes. At the moment there is no legal age restriction on buying e-cigarettes, which are battery-powered cigarette substitutes which provide users with nicotine but have no tar and smoke and fewer harmful chemicals.
Martin Knight, head of health improvement at the Public Health Department, has urged Islanders looking to quit smoking to use other methods rather than turning to vaping.
He said: ‘We know that e-cigarettes are less likely to be as harmful as cigarettes, but they are certainly not risk-free. Nicotine is an addictive and harmful chemical.
‘We recognise that some people are changing to vaping and recognise that that is a good behavioural shift, but within some of those products are some cancer-causing chemicals. There are other options, such as nicotine replacement therapy, that we know work. We don’t have the same ability to guarantee the safe use of e-cigarettes.
‘We would not advise people to use them. We have no evidence of their long-term health implications.’
The UK is pushing through legislation to ban e-cigarettes from being sold to anyone under the age of 18, and Mr Knight believes that this is something that should be done in Jersey.
‘We don’t know how many young children have used e-cigarettes, but that is something that we are going to be monitoring,’ he said.
‘We would need to see whether what the report found is being replicated elsewhere. The last Jersey Social Survey showed that the number of young people who were smoking was decreasing, which is positive, but there was nothing about e-cigarettes.
‘It is difficult to know if vaping would be a gateway to taking up smoking, but that is obviously something we are concerned about with our younger people.
‘There need to be tighter restrictions around advertising these products, and we are watching what is happening across Britain and the EU. Restricting the sale to under-18s would seem to be something that we would support.’
The UK report, which was compiled by Liverpool John Moores University, showed that 19% of the 16,193 teenagers who responded to the survey had tried vaping, and 5% of teenagers using e-cigarettes had never smoked.
A CAMPAIGN was launched in 2014 to warn Islanders of the dangers of e-cigarette chargers following a rise in the number of fires caused by the devices.
Last year more than 100 fires across Britain were caused by faulty or incorrect chargers overheating.
And in early 2014, Jersey firefighters were called out after a charger exploded and caused a small fire in a town property.
The Jersey Fire and Rescue Service subsequently launched a campaign to promote the safe use of the devices.
Martyn Maguire, group commander at the Fire and Rescue Service, said: ‘The issue is not people using them, it is the cheaper or incorrect versions of chargers that are the problem. They don’t switch off when the e-cigarette is fully-charged and they explode after over-heating, which has caused many fires in the UK.
One Islander, whose e-cigarette exploded while it was on charge, described how she heard a loud noise from her mother’s lounge.
The woman said: ‘I saw a flash and then heard a big bang and I got a fright because I didn’t know what it was. I ran into the lounge and the carpet and wall were on fire. This all happened in seconds because the e-cigarette had only been on charge for 20 minutes.
