Is Passive Vaping Harmful?

Researchers from Switzerland and Australia have submitted two reports, separately, after carrying out a thorough research on the topic of passive vaping, vapor dispersion and its side effects. These reports, somehow, displayed a similar struggle public health experts in California went through, who claimed that not only passive vaping is a health hazard, getting in contact with a surface that contains vaping residues can also be harmful. Needless to say, we are going to discuss the reports compiled by Australian and Swizz experts.

According to the Australian report that was compiled by researchers at Health Risk Policy Unit in Sydney -

“little is known about the potential adverse health effects of passive exposure to EC vapor.”

Instead of doing something about their cluelessness, they went on,

“to summarize and review all studies that have examined potential adverse health effects of passive exposure from inhaling EC vapor.”

They came up with a pretty figure of 312 case studies before realizing they would at most need sixteen out of them for analysis.

This small number of 16 studies opened all the doors to the wisdom island for these researchers and they concluded,

“A variety of study designs were used to investigate potential health risks from passive exposure to EC vapor. These included direct exposure studies involving humans and animals, and indirect exposure studies using volunteer EC users or smoking machines. The majority of studies determined that passive exposure to EC vapor may pose a health risk to bystanders. All papers encountered a number of limitations.” The researchers finally came to the terms that although passive vaping might have a “potential to lead to adverse health effects” but they concluded that “the risk from being passively exposed to EC vapor is likely to be less than the risk from passive exposure to conventional cigarette smoke.”

In other words, they claimed that they didn’t know much to start with and they didn’t end up with any useful information either.

Researchers at EMPA Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science and Technology rolled up their sleeves too and carried out an experiment in a chamber, to give it a more roomy feeling, so they could study particulate size, distribution and concentration of an actual vapor. They also placed a dummy inside the chamber at human body temperature for the sake of representing an actual person in a supposed room scenario and took readings outside the chamber as well to minimize the diffusion losses of the vapors.

After the careful experiment, the researchers found:

“a rapid increase in the particle concentration during 2-5 second interval was followed by a rapid decrease in the concentration,”

Around the vapor region. They also noticed that the concentrations tend to decrease with respect to distance from the dummy and dispersion of the vapors was also recorded to be slow.

The researchers claimed-

“This study shows for the first time exhaled e-cigarette particles are liquid droplets that evaporate rapidly upon exhalation. The results presented here may have a positive implication for continued use of e-cigarettes in indoor areas.”

Huffington Post had some funny remarks about the research that read-

“Researchers found that indoor vaping is ‘unlikely’ to pose a risk to the air quality of a room.”