Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Fewer high school students in the US are smoking traditional cigarettes, but the number of those using e-cigarettes has tripled over the past two years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Thursday.
According to Reuters reporter David Beasley, newly released CDC data indicates that 22.9 percent of high school students reported using a tobacco product in the previous 30 days in 2013, a 1.4 percent decrease from 2011.
Over that same period of time, the CDC reported that the number of high school students who reported smoking a traditional cigarette over the past month dropped from 15.8 percent in 2011 to 12.7 percent in 2013. However, the use of e-cigarettes had increased from 1.5 percent in 2011 to 4.5 percent in 2013, Beasley added.
The rate among middle-school students remained constant at 1.1 percent, said Tripp Mickle of The Wall Street Journal, but the rate of high-schoolers trying e-cigs for the first time increased from 10 percent to nearly 12 percent, according to the CDC National Youth Tobacco Survey, a questionnaire given each year to approximately 20,000 students.
E-cigarettes are battery powered devices that turn liquid nicotine into vapor instead of the smoke given off by traditional cigarettes, Beasley said. They are currently unregulated by the federal government, although the US Food and Drug Administration proposed new rules in April that would prohibit their sale to anyone under the age of 18.
“Though e-cigarettes deliver nicotine, which is addictive, most researchers say they are less harmful than traditional cigarettes because they don’t release toxins through combustion like traditional cigarettes,” Mickle said. “E-cigarette advocates say vapor devices… help smokers quit traditional cigarettes. But public-health officials remain concerned about the effect e-cigarettes could have on youth.”
“A CDC study released in August found that more than a quarter million adolescents and teens who had never smoked traditional cigarettes used an electronic cigarette in 2013, a threefold increase from 2011,” added Beasley, who noted that David Sutton, a spokesman for Altria Group (which owns three tobacco companies) said that the firm is also in favor of rules that would prohibit the sale of e-cigarettes to minors.
In September, researchers from the University of Southern California analyzed secondhand e-cigarette smoke, and found that while it exposes people to fewer carcinogenic particles, it is still not without its own harm. In short, while the devices are safer than traditional cigarettes, they still have their own unique set of health risks.
Their research found that e-cigarettes had a 10-fold decrease in harmful carcinogens versus traditional cigarettes, and that the devices had an exposure of close to zero for organic carcinogens. However, they were also found to contain toxic elements such as chromium, nickel, lead and zinc – metals that are inhaled by the smoker and also exhaled in the vapor making them dangerous to others, though in lower concentration than traditional cigarettes.
The CDC tobacco study also found that cigarettes were the most prevalent tobacco product used by white (14 percent) and Hispanic high school students (13.4 percent), followed closely by cigars (11.4 percent and 12.1 percent, respectively). Among African-American high-school students, cigar use was nearly 50 percent higher than cigarette use (14.7 percent vs. 9.0 percent), the US health agency said in a statement.
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E-Cigarette Use Up, Traditional Cigarette Use Down Among High School Students
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