© Mark Blinch / Reuters
More than 75 percent of flavored electronic cigarettes and their refill cartridges contain the chemical diacetyl, which is linked to a disease known as 'popcorn lung', a new study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has shown.
The name "popcorn lung" comes from the disease's origin in microwave popcorn processing plants, where workers breathed in artificial butter flavorings. Now cases of bronchiolitis obliterans, the scientific name for the devastating disease, could arise from e-cigarette use, according to the study, which was funded through a government grant from the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center.
"Recognition of the hazards associated with inhaling flavoring chemicals started with 'popcorn lung' over a decade ago. However, diacetyl and other related flavoring chemicals are used in many other flavors beyond butter-flavored popcorn, including fruit flavors, alcohol flavors, and, we learned in our study, candy-flavored e-cigarettes," Joseph Allen, assistant professor of exposure assessment sciences and lead author of the study, told the Harvard Gazette.
In deciding which chemical flavorings to test, Allen and the rest of the team targeted those they figured were most likely to entice children. Flavors such as cotton candy, 'Fruit Squirts', and cupcake were some of the 51 types used in e-cigarette tests.
Each e-cig was placed inside a sealed compartment, from which a "lab-built device" was attached to suck out air for eight seconds, allowing 15 to 30 second breaks in between. The resulting air stream was analyzed for diacetyl and two other chemicals ruled as "high priority" in terms of their risk of respiratory hazard in the workplace by the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association.
Diacetyl was found in 39 of the 51 tests, while the other two chemicals - acetoin and 2,3-pentanedione - were present in 46 and 23 cases, respectively.
There are over 7,000 kinds of flavored e-cigarettes and accompanying e-liquids on the market today. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not currently regulate them, the agency has offered to, saying the e-products, which are marketed to counter traditional smoking habits, could fall under the same rules as tobacco products.
"Since most of the health concerns about e-cigarettes have focused on nicotine, there is still much we do not know about e-cigarettes," said David Christiani, a professor of environmental genetics and co-author of the study. "In addition to containing varying levels of the addictive substance nicotine, they also contain other cancer-causing chemicals, such as formaldehyde, and as our study shows, flavoring chemicals that can cause lung damage."
The study notes that the lowest level of exposure at which popcorn lung was detected in workers working for 8 hours per day was 0.2ppm. According to the converter at [Link] I believe that works out to 200 mcg/Liter. that's 200,000 micrograms per cubic meter. At about one meter average working air intake per hour, it was found that workers inhaling 1,600,000 micrograms of diacetyl every day for years began developing popcorn lung.
As opposed to this concern about Vapers inhaling about 10 micrograms.
Actually, while Dr. Siegel didn't go into the specifics of it, if we reasonably dropped the weird high-level outlier of 238 micrograms supposedly measured for the kid-loving-candy-flavored "Peach Schnapps" variety (Golly but those kidz DO luv their Schnapps, now don't they?) the average exposure drops to below FIVE micrograms.
So the ordinary vaper of these weird flavored fluids would have to sit around vaping for roughly 160,000 days (i.e. FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY-EIGHT **YEARS**) to get just a one day equivalent exposure to the workers who need to work for years on end to get the dreaded popcorn lung. How many years? It's not clear what the minimum might be, but from the information supplied let's *guess* we're talking about popcorn workers generally working at least ten years before they're buttered up and put away.
So how many days of e-cigging would it take for e-ciggers to get that sort of nasty worker dose? 160,000 x 10yrs x 300 workdays per year equals:
584,000,000 days of puffing away on an ecig (about one and a half million years) before the typical e-cigger might get popcorn lung.
Feel free to check my figures: I *have* been known to accidentally drop/add a decimal point here or there as I do a lot of this stuff in my head... but realize this: even if I'm off by a full order of magnitude we'd still be looking at 160,000 years of puffing. If I was off by THREE orders of magnitude, it would STILL take the better part of 2000 years of constant puffing.
The jury is still out as to whether ecigs might be somewhat harmful or somewhat beneficial to health, but if they're truly beneficial enough to extend the average life span to over fifteen hundred years...
Well hell's bells on a trampoline, I'd take my popcorn lung at that point with a cherry on top and a big silly smile!
- MJM
EDIT: Heh, I *knew* this study reminded me of something! If you look at my analysis of the diethylene glycol study at [Link] (i.e the one that spurred all the "Antifreeze In E-Cigs!" headlines around the world), you'll find the same pattern of researchers finding VERY low results in just about everything they tested except for ONE absurdly high result in ONE sample. Of course in their case emphasizing that sample only meant ignoring 17 other results. In the present study we're being asked to ignore FIFTY-NINE other results!
EDIT TWO: I tracked down my 2007 article on popcorn fumes at [Link] if you'd like to read about parents murdering their children by exposing them to popcorn fumes at the movies. Odd that the ecig exposure wasn't compared to those sorts of exposure, eh?