Author: Aimee Cunningham / Source: Science News
On November 15, Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, announced new sales restrictions on certain e-cigarette flavors preferred by teens.
The move was a response to a worrying rise in vaping among adolescents in the last year. “E-cigs have become an almost ubiquitous and dangerous trend among teens,” he warned, calling it an “epidemic” in a September speech.His claim is no exaggeration. In 2018, 20.8 percent of high schoolers surveyed said they had used e-cigarettes at least once in the last 30 days, up from 11.7 percent in 2017. That is a 78 percent jump in e-cig use, based on data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey (SN Online: 11/16/18). On December 17, the 2018 Monitoring the Future survey, a national substance use questionnaire of 8th, 10th and 12th graders, reported similar increases in the New England Journal of Medicine.
That spike may be due to use of the top-selling e-cigarette brand, Juul. One of a new class of e-cigarettes called pod-mods, a Juul vaporizes a prefilled pod of flavored liquid that contains a higher concentration…
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