Author Archives: Rob Ellard

It is as surprising that this story has gone without much coverage given the content of the findings – but more so when one considers who it was doing the testing. Air quality sampling was carried out in vape shops, a place where a fug can build up due to the number of people visiting and staying for a while to chat.

Where were these vape shops? California, and the testing was carried out by the Californian State Health Department. This is the very same department who make ludicrous claims about second and third-hand vape being dangerous – and telling people “we don’t know what’s in it”.

On the first occasion, “many of the employees vaped throughout the sampling and 13 customers vaped while in the shop. There was no active ventilation system, and visible clouds of vapour were visible at times.”

The results:

Nicotine: Not detected
Glycidol: Not detected
Formaldehyde: 7.2 ppb (a normal indoor/outdoor air level)
Diacetyl: Not detected using standard method
2,3-Pentanedione: Not detected using standard method
Acetyl butyryl: Not detected using standard method
Acetoin: Not detected using standard method
Acetone: Not detected
Ethyl benzene: Not detected
m,p-Xylene: Not detected
o-Xylene: Not detected
Toluene: Not detected
Acetaldehyde: Not detected
Acetonitrile: Not detected
alpha-pinene: Not detected
Benzene: Not detected
Chloroform: Not detected
d-Limonene: Not detected
Methylene chloride: Not detected
Methyl methacrylate: Not detected
n-Hexane: Not detected
Styrene: Not detected

Shortly afterwards, the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety tested a vape store for tested for formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, and three other chemicals of concern. Again, levels were comparable with the average home or not detected at all.

What these two events confirm is that there’s absolutely no increased danger being posed to the general public by vapers. Moreover, it emphasises why employers, who genuinely want to help their smoking staff to quit, ought to give serious consideration to allowing vaping on business premises. Also, it ought to act as a wake-up call to the Californian State Health Department – they certainly need one when it comes to vaping.

As Michael Siegel (a man who’s campaign for workplace smoke bans) says: “Based on the current scientific evidence, I fail to see the justification for banning vaping in most public places. I just don’t see any reasonable evidence at this time that it poses any significant health hazard to bystanders.”

What’s this? Violence isn’t acceptable? Fine, just cast your mind back to United Airlines Flight 3411 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. We weren’t there and yet almost all of us have seen the footage because people watched it, went “Wow” and clicked on share. Some may have been sharing to say that smashing a doctor’s face into a metal-framed aeroplane chair is unacceptable practise from an international flight company. Some may have, but the majority were sharing it for (what is apparently known as) ‘bants’.

No claims are being made here to understand the thinking behind enjoying watching somebody get hurt, but amusement is had. Just cast a gaze over the pages of memes created in response to the airline incident. Not so long ago happy slapping was all the rage, shortly after the advent of a video facility on mobile phones. Is it possible that the public’s enjoyment of viewing physical pain and aggression comes from the happy slapper generation growing up and starting YouTube channels?

The only thing that can be drawn from this is how could the public’s lust for a return to gladiatorial behaviour benefit vaping?

Maybe you are a shop owner and you would like to increase your brand awareness in your locality, in which case get some CCTV in. Make sure it’s going to be able to record viewable footage. Now all you need to do is either stage a good punch up in your bricks and mortar or wait until you get broken into. The problem with the latter is that it’s unpredictable and there’s always the chance they will escape without major injuries unless you leave some decent bear traps lying around on the floor.

The local paper will love to publish the stills of Dwayne being helped out of the door by his best mate Gary, carrying his severed limb in his arms instead of your mods. Dwayne and Gary will love to see themselves in print, their mates down the local pub will laugh and the police station’s roof will explode with guffaws at the pair’s stupidity. Sit back and wait for the crowds to pour into the shop to see where it all took place. Standard business practise 0-1 Violence.

Or maybe you are a public health officer, tasked with reducing the rates of smoking in your county. “Oh what to do,” you ask yourself, “without decent funding from the government how on earth can I make this happen?”

Have you not been paying attention? Violence is now the solution. Load up a car with a bunch of other public health officials and cruise around town looking for smokers. One of you needs to record the ensuing events to act as a warning to other smokers. Pounce and use surprise to balance out your probable inability to offer up a decent scrap. “Want to smoke in our town, mister? Not anymore, bukko.” Thanks to violence you could have the first zero-rate smoking town in the country.

The worrying thing is that someone, somewhere was probably already giving this serious consideration.

This week, the American Council for Science and Health (ACSH) tell the tale of a microbead paper. The researchers claimed their investigation produced data proving that young fish prefer to eat plastic microbeads rather than the usual yummy items that fish would otherwise eat. It was published in the respected Science journal in June 2016.

Science is brilliant – except for when those working in it create works of fiction to suit private agendas or as acts of self-promotion. This microbead study was almost universally greeted with responses ranging from suspicion to accusations of fraud. Eventually Science issued an “expression of concern” about the work.

Even so, after ten months, the original paper still stood. It’s taken a full review by Sweden’s Central Ethical Review Board to push matters forward. Fabricated data is now claimed by the researchers to have been stolen, methods were carried out that the lab didn’t have equipment for and timeframes are all awry.

The article has now been retracted from public viewing, ACSH has published a detailed account of the sorry tale – but is that enough? The memory of fish preferring tiny bits of plastic will persist and, in many ways, that sums up a lot of the corrupt science surrounding vaping.

It should be pointed out here that nobody is accusing the researchers from the University of Louisville’s Tobacco Regulation and Addiction Centre of producing an intentionally dodgy piece of work ground in lies – that would be the very last thing on anybody’s mind. No, they probably tried their very hardest to ensure that their work on the presence of formaldehyde in vape was of the very highest standard.

Just to prove how serious they are about ensuring the highest standards in their research, the team looked at one other previous paper to see how vapers vape. Then they looked at an overview of published material on how vapers vape and ignored the bits they didn’t like or understand. Consequently, they worked out that vapers like cigalikes and 4yr-old variable voltage mods paired with Evods. Plus, the vapers using the Evods like to take four-second hits at 4.2, 4.7 and 5 volts.

Amazingly, and you’d better sit down for this bit as it’ll come as a big surprise, Team Louisville discovered that ecigs produce aldehydes of all different hues. If you hadn’t heard about this before then you will as soon as their press release hits the news-desks of Britain’s favourite tabloid fish and chip wrapping.

Any superficial examination of the subject would produce the clear information that aldehydes are only produced in atomisers experiencing slight to full-blown dry hits, and yet this seems to have eluded Louisville‘s finest?

It may not be dishonest, but the work is certainly shameful. Here’s to a retraction in approximately ten months

Firstly, if you want to begin to knock vaping then start off by pointing out that smokers are still smoking even if they’re using an electronic cigarette. Yes, this isn’t true (in the sense that it’s totally factually incorrect), but you are guaranteed to have annoyed the vaper sufficiently that they will now be actively and animatedly engaging with you. It might be a touch more shouty than normal conversation levels, but this is really good if you’re hard of hearing.

Now, providing pushing hasn’t begun, tell the vaper all about flavours. All they need to know is that flavours are wrong. They are wrong because it simply makes people enjoy vaping. We all know that important things aren’t pleasurable: making an insurance claim, moving home, voting and open-heart surgery are all known to be exceptionally tedious or disconcerting. Nothing is more important to your bowels than a good portion of roughage a day. Is roughage tasty and full of flavour? No. Yet everybody loves ice cream and candyfloss. So, there, proof that making eliquid full of flavour is bad and therefore someone should make a law that compels all juice makers to only produce from a prescribed list. The list should only include the following flavours: cabbage, lettuce, rice, sawdust and earwax.

By this point, most vapers will be sagely nodding in agreement with you. You’ve made good points, you argued them well, and you’ve won them over to the side of common sense. But there will always be one

You will need to elevate your voice so that they can hear, bellow: “I like to think about children!” The point being that the red-faced ignoramus opposite you never thinks about children because he or she is always too busy sucking on a metal rod. The fools. You, on the other hand, know that thinking about children all day makes you a compassionate and caring person.

Tell the vaper that children might pick up their vape stick and become addicted to it. Maybe they think it’s cool? Maybe they think it makes them look grown-up like the trendy people they’ve seen on the Internet? Maybe they see themselves as becoming a trendsetter like David Dorn or hip and happening like those folks in ECITA? How cool are they going to appear when the vaping stick explodes or they go through the vape gateway to drugs?

You will now be asking yourself: “How do I know all these vaper people will listen to me?” The answer is simple and true, because vapers are always open to new evidence and are actively interested in helping to develop the products and the direction of the market. Vapers, vape companies and vape manufacturers have been listening to each other and experts for years – so they are bound to give you a warm welcome wherever you see a number of them gathering.

Good luck with convincing vapers they are doing everything wrong, the world needs more people like you.

One of the major advantages of vaping, after that of being a far safer form of using nicotine to avoid the toxic products of tobacco combustion, was that it could be much cheaper than a cigarette addiction. The cost savings do assume that you don’t get sucked in to collecting every type of mod and atomiser ever made, but get even greater if you are one of those people who make your own juice.

It looks as though, regardless of whether you are a home brew aficionado or boutique liquid fan, it’s all going to get a bit pricier. So, what is set to happen? As of May 20^th:

• A 10ml size limit for eliquids
• A 2ml capacity limit for disposable e-cigarettes, cartridges and tanks
• All eliquid products to be child and tamper-proof
• All packs must include a health warning covering 30% of the surfaces of the unit packet and any outside packaging
• There has to be instructions for use, information on addictiveness and toxicity on the packaging and accompanying information leaflet
• There is a ban certain promotional and misleading descriptors on packaging
• Juice makers must ensure that all substances contained in the product and the nicotine content are declared on the label
• A registration scheme for businesses engaged in cross-border distance sales of e-cigarette products is being introduced
• There is a prohibition on the advertising or promotion, directly or indirectly, of electronic cigarettes and re-fill containers on a number of media platforms, including on television, radio, newspapers and magazines
• Cigalikes with a nicotine concentration above 20mg/ml will need to be licensed as medicines and be subject to the same rules as over-the-counter drugs
• Smokers are set to be hit to as there is going to be a ban on packs of 10, and menthol flavoured cigarettes are set to be phased out over three years.

Mark Hughes, Nottinghamshire Trading Standards: “These changes to the law should help create a level playing field and help consumers get a consistent product. So while shops may be aware of the changes to the law, those who make or sell e-cigarettes or e-liquids online via social media, auction sites or from their own website need to be aware that these changes apply to them too. Hopefully it will remove a lot of potentially unsafe products from the legal market.”

Richard Hyslop, Independent British Vape Trade Association: “Some companies have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds getting products ready and doing the necessary testing needed in advance of these rules being enforced. Currently you can go and buy a 30ml bottle of e-liquid and after the 20th May you’ll have to buy three 10ml bottles. Companies are doing their best not to pass these costs onto customers, it’s inevitable that some companies will have to put up prices a little.”

Alex Fry, Leicestershire Trading Standards: “We are finding that shops are aware of the changes to the law but small online retailers are not. With millions of buyers ready and waiting, there’s no better place for you to sell than eBay. We have found online sellers selling e-liquids in 100ml bottles with a nicotine strength over 20mg/ml. After 20 May this will be illegal unless the e-liquid is registered as a medicine.”

Are you ready for the vaper’s Mayday? Are you planning to change what you buy and how you vape in the future?

Image credits

Woman

Man

Landing in an even number gets the kid on a waiting list for a 6-month salary-free modern apprenticeship in Poundland. Any odd number automatically qualifies them for Higher Education, regardless of the likely GCSE results, and someone from the loan company pops out of a cupboard to harvest their kidneys.

Any double, treble or missed board moves them straight to the unemployment office, where they discover they were sanctioned while in Year 3 and can not receive any benefits until 2029. In the event the child faces more than one option, the worst one applies.

Bullseyes count for nothing, just like the promises to help fulfil their dreams the Head made at the start of Year 7 – before it became an academy, sacked all the staff, and replaced them with a second-hand floor-polishing machine from Azerbaijan. That said, Mr Polisher did achieve some spectacular exam results with 5C last year.

The one thing no career service ever told any child was that there are certain jobs, certain secret jobs, which contain the stuff of dreams. Nobody ever told me I could be a spaceman. Nobody mentioned Premier League multimillionaire football player was on the table. And not one word was spoken about the potential for me to work (ha! It’s funny to even use that word in reference to this) as a public health expert.

Somebody, somewhere thought ‘I know what, I’ll give a load of money to some people in Australia, Canada, the States and one in England to see if they can produce the most blindingly obvious study‘. So stunningly obvious it would be the equivalent of walking through a forest, pointing at every tree and shouting the words: “That is a tree”.

Thus, “Does the regulatory environment for e-cigarettes influence the effectiveness of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation?: Longitudinal findings from the ITC Four Country Survey” was born.

“This is the first study to examine the impact of regulatory environment for electronic cigarettes (ECs) on their real-world effectiveness for smoking cessation,” writes the team. You can imagine their little faces all painted up with excitement as they discussed this during an online open conferencing session. The very first study to look at whether banning vaping had any effect on its success at helping smokers quit.

Hang on, it doesn’t sound so clever when I write it in my own words. In fact, it seems never mind, let’s find out what the team discovered: “Use of ECs in the real world during a quit attempt appears only effective for sustaining smoking abstinence in a less restrictive EC environment suggesting that the benefits of ECs for smoking cessation are likely highly dependent on the regulatory environment.”

For those of you who don’t speak ‘Academic’, that translates to: Blimey, we discovered that vaping only works well for fag smokers in countries that allow vaping.

Science seemed much more aloof when scientists were allowed to stub cigarettes out in the eyes of beagle puppies. I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but feel I could have contributed to this stunningly insightful paper. Contributed, and then gone to spend all of my easy money on Blackjack and stuff.

Come on careers guidance officers, up your game.

In the same piece the reader can discover that with the largest of gorillas, ones weighing around twice that of a human, they have a fully erect penis measuring just two and a half centimetres. No wonder they can be a bit feisty. And the chimp’s testes are so large because they are constantly at it and therefore require a large supply of well, you can read the article if you’re so interested – or go buy the author’s book called The Cradle of Humanity.

It’s possible to hold opinions on things, like a team’s chance of success or whether global warming is really a thing, but it all seems rather pointless to cling to the original opinion if it is proved to be wrong. There’s little point wandering about and telling strangers in the street that England possess the greatest international football side when every couple of years the pubs fill with depressed souls praying for the tournament to finish as painlessly as possible.

You might think that Mother Shipton was bang on with her prophesies. You might reckon that if she’d gone to Ye Olde Ladbrokes she’d have made a mint on her amazing predictions. “For those who live the century through In fear and trembling this shall do. Flee to the mountains and the dens To bog and forest and wild fens,” she said.

Which means that as we ticked over into the 21^st century we’d all be struck by some incredible fear and leg it off up hillsides and into forests to live there. But we didn’t and, unless you are in a tent reading this on your telephone, neither did you. She was wrong and her believers are misguided. Shiptonites everywhere should line up and apologise to us for we have read something and digested its contents – we know more today than we did yesterday and we can use that knowledge to help us lead our lives.

It’s what we all do. We make a mistake, we learn from the mistake and then we try very hard not to make that same mistake again. Science and technology wouldn’t be the brilliant things they are without over two thousand years of people learning through discovery and error.

So, public health experts: when you come across evidence that debunks the cornerstones of your arguments, whenever you see evidence that contradicts you views, embrace it. Swear at it, break things and hurl food out of the window by all means. Do whatever you do when you are annoyed, that’s fine, but just don’t continue to tell us that up is down, England won the last three football world cups, and that you have bigger balls than a monkey.

I can’t speak for the others, but I’m going to assume they all feel exactly the same; cheese is the greatest thing on the face of the planet. At some point a scientist will discover that it has life extending properties, and makes you dead attractive while eating it or carrying a wheel of it about in public. If somebody thought about it for a bit, I’m betting cheese could solve all religious conflicts and end world hunger – especially the last one.

When you first escape from the family home, forging your way and your independent life, you live on tins of beans and cheese. Cheese in sandwiches, on jacket potatoes, on top of the beans, layered and melted with ham – you name it, there’s not a recipe that doesn’t benefit from cheese. Even the best puddings have cheese in them. Well, the only pudding worth eating.

But times are changing. There’s some kind of bait and switch going on.

Forty years ago you could fill half a fridge with cheeses and it would have cost you the equivalent of a cigarette or something. Cheese was almost free. Then the price went up as soon as the cheese magnets clicked on you’d started a family and needed four times the amount. But it was OK, Big Cheese catered for your needs by selling you 500g packs, that’s over 1lb of cheese a pack in old money.

But it turns out that Big Cheese is no better than the bloke selling crack down the Rec. It has us all hooked and it can now treat us as its playthings. The 500g packs stayed the same size but only had 450g inside. This then shrank to 400g. The cost remained the same as the contents were reduced to ‘just barely over one sandwich worth‘ 350g.

Then the wife cam home from shopping at Tescasdaburies. She came home, reached into one of the bags and asked me to place the thing that she was handing me into the fridge. Something didn’t feel right. In fact, things were very, very wrong. It seems like only a few months ago all cheese was for sale in half-kilogram blocks – the pathetic specimen languishing in my palm was a 300g sliver. They got more cheese on ration during the war.

Probably.

It’s an outrage. It’s a crime against humanity. Is this the future? Have we all become extras in The Fifth Element? Vendors are now flogging off all their non-TPD compliant juice stocks. Soon it’ll all be tiny 10ml bottles. Next up: Cigarettes will be all filter, and you’ll have to queue outside licensed vape shops to have three drops dripped onto your coil once a week.

If this is the best the future has to offer then I’m off to overdose on a slab of Lancashire and a roule of full-fat soft garlic and herb nonsense.

Yes, you are all fooling yourselves that you like your fancy flavours. Adults don’t like sweet things, adults never eat puddings. And even if you are enjoying those liquids, it means one thing – you are doing vaping wrong. You should be not enjoying tobacco flavours, you should be hating vaping.

That’s what people campaigning against vaping believe. Or, at least, pretend to believe when they’re out in public. Nobody knows if they actually fall for their own bunkum.

They are pushing to kill of flavours over in Canada and it has drawn a great response from vapers. “Flavours are marketed to me” images are spreading on social media with the tag #BillS5. Maybe you fancy adding yours in?