British Parliament to assess impact of e-cigarettes


10/30/2017

The British Parliament's Committee on Science and Technology will conduct a study on the impact of electronic cigarettes on human health and the economy, and assess the effectiveness of the existing regulation of the sale and smoking of these devices. The parliamentarians also intend to find out whether electronic cigarettes make young people used to smoke ordinary cigarettes and whether there is a dependence on the veiling.



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Announcing the new study, the former Minister of Health of the UK and now the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for Science and Technology Norman Lam noted that the importance of this market for the country's economy and its regulation issues still has significant gaps. According to the head of the committee, it is necessary to understand as much as possible the importance of the "growing industry" of electronic cigarettes, both for individual citizens and for the country as a whole, considering that increasingly more people are switching from conventional cigarettes to electronic cigarettes.

According to the committee, now about 2.9 million people use electronic cigarettes in the UK regularly, which is four times more than in 2012. Of these, almost half had previously smoked ordinary cigarettes. At the moment, electronic devices are the most popular way of abandoning traditional smoking in the country. This allows many experts to talk about electronic cigarettes as an effective tool to reduce the number of smokers. Nevertheless, they do not solve the problem. According to the UK Ministry of Health, nearly 80,000 people die from smoking-related diseases every year, and the health system's cost of treating such diseases reaches £ 2 billion a year.

A study published in February 2017 by a number of British and American institutions with the support of Cancer Research UK concludes that e-cigarettes are safer in the long run than smoking conventional ones. This was the first study of the long-term effects vaping. Yet, the number of smokers who took part in it was relatively small - only 181 people.

However, not everyone in the UK considers electronic cigarettes more harmless for health, arguing that vaping makes adolescents and young people can become addicted to smoking conventional cigarettes. In particular, the professor of the London School of Hygiene of Tropical Medicine Martin McKee and Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Liverpool Simon Capwell believe that the above study shows no reliable evidence that electronic cigarettes are harmless and that they do not become a "path to smoking" for young people and adolescents. In addition, some experts believe that people can become addicted to vaping, just like to smoking conventional cigarettes.

British parliamentarians intend to study all points of view. "We want to understand where in the scientific and experimental base there are gaps, how regulation affects this market, how this growing industry itself affects the costs of the health system and the state budget," Norm Lamb explained.

As for the regulation, until now, the British authorities have been loyal to the active development of the market for electronic devices for smoking. In May 2016, the rules for the sale of such devices were adopted, and veiling was banned for persons under 18 years of age. Now the volume of this market in the UK, according to Euromonitor, reaches £ 1.1 billion. At the same time, some countries - Australia, Japan and Brazil, etc. - completely banned the sale of electronic cigarettes.

source: dailymail.co.uk