Passive Vaping And Third Hand E-Cig Vapour, The New Fantasy Fetish 'Science'

Such has been the success of the tobacco control industry in bastardising science by pandering to the fears and prejudices of the most intolerant in society, it's fascinating to watch health-obsessed fruitcakes of all stripes attempt to copy their methods.

Following the Godber Blueprint to the letter, we've seen them all busily "fostering the perception" that their particular bête noir is harming everyone around the user. Hence daft efforts at scaring the public into believing the threat of passive drinking and passive obesity, amongst others.

In a hilarious new twist, though, this study from the University of Braunschweig in Germany attempts to go through anti-tobacco's joke list in fast forward to demonise electronic cigarettes.

Far from beginning from a neutral standpoint, the abstract decides that - as e-cigs contain particles and chemicals - "“passive vaping” must be expected from the consumption of e-cigarettes".

Now, I've regularly charted here the potential of these marvellous little devices to intensely irritate psycho antis, but I think I must have under-estimated the sentiment. It seems the hunt is on - and the grants waiting for liars researchers to suck up - to find a silver bullet with which to get e-cigs banned, especially now the tobacco industry is enthusiastically eyeing them.

The Braunschweig study is behind a paywall, but my delightful medical pdf-getting fellow jewel robber has come up trumps again and furnished Dick with a copy. After waxing lyrical about passive tobacco smoke, they move seamlessly on to vapour in the very next paragraph.

Beyond indoor climate, air flow conditions, room size and number of e-cigarette users many other parameters have the potential to affect “passive vaping”. The concentrations of the exhaled compounds during e-cigarette consumption can be expected to differ with the composition of the applied liquids, the type of e-cigarette in use, the age of the e-cigarette (e.g. due to remains of previous liquids), length of the puff and interval between the puffs. Moreover, the composition of the exhaled air will be affected by age, sex, activity, health status, and diet of the user.

As you can see, it's no longer a question of whether passive vaping is a real thing, more the level of threat it poses dependant on who is vaping.

To be worried about something so very unthreatening as water vapour with an infinitesimally negligible volume of unused (and harmless) nicotine, you have to wonder if the study authors have ever seen a car.

But it gets more neurotic still in the following paragraph.

Another important aspect in the future discussion about e-cigarettes will be the effect of “thirdhand-smoke” (THS) that mainly describes human exposure against residues of smoking on clothes, furniture and other indoor surfaces (Matt et al., 2011)(that's the über-loopy Georg E Matt, folks - DP). In case of e-cigarettes the solvent of the “liquids” may remain on available surfaces and be a source for the contamination of residents.

This is taking a thing that isn't even real when dealing with tobacco cigarettes, applying it wholesale to e-cigs ... and struggling desperately to keep a straight face while doing so.

When reading such hysterical and blatantly policy-based research as this, I wonder if someone must have thrown me through a magic wardrobe sometime when I was asleep.