FDA Cautions Against Health Hazards Due To E-Cigarettes

The FDA or Food and Drug Administration has teamed up with other health care experts in a drive to raise caution among the customers regarding the latent health hazards related to the use of electronic or E-cigarettes.

The E-cigarettes are operated via battery and intended to appear quite similar to the normally available cigarettes. These devices normally hold sealed units packed with nicotine, flavouring and several chemicals and are rampantly vended online and seen in several shopping centres. These devices convert the highly addictive nicotine along with other chemical substances into vapour form for inhalation.

The FDA is alarmed regarding the safety standards of such products and the manner in which they are mass vended. The FDA is apprehensive about the fact that:

• The e-cigarettes have the potential to raise addiction to nicotine in youngsters and could lure kids into trying several other tobacco products inclusive of the regular cigarettes that are believed to cause untimely fatality.
• The e-cigarettes could include components which are considered lethal to human beings.
• As the safety and efficiency of such products for their proposed usage hasn’t yet been handed over to the FDA, so presently the end users would not have any means of deciphering the level of safety on the proposed usage of e-cigarettes or regarding the percentage of potentially lethal chemicals being used here or the dosage of nicotine present that would be inhaled during the use of this product.

There were heightened apprehensions among parents that these e-cigarettes were vended with no legal age restraints and were accessible in varying flavouring like chocolate, strawberry, mint amongst others that have significant allure among youngsters. Additionally, these devices did not have any kind of warnings about health risks as compared to the FDA- approved nicotine substitute products and the normally available cigarettes.

The FDA had made public the results of the lab assessment that pointed to the presence of toxic chemical components in electronic cigarettes. The FDA’s division of Pharmaceutical Analysis assessed the components in a tiny sample of sealed units present in the e-cigarettes that belonged to two of the top brand names. One of the analysed samples was detected with diethylene glycol that is a potentially lethal chemical substance employed in antifreeze. Numerous other samples were noted to show the presence of carcinogens inclusive of nitrosamines.

FDA has been scrutinising and confining consignments holding e-cigarettes in the border regions.

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