We've all seen the screaming headlines on how "poisonous" e-juice is: Selling a Poison by the Barrel: Liquid Nicotine for E-Cigarettes by the NY Times, is a good example.
It's also on the nightly news: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/e-cigarette-poisonings-on-the-rise-cdc/.
So I was, of course, curious what the truth was.
My first research turned up this article where we find the following:
Looks kind of alarming, especially when you compare it to the CBS report above: "For the report, the CDC examined records of phone calls made to poison control centers regarding conventional cigarettes, e-cigarettes and nicotine liquid, with a total of 2,405 calls for e-cigarette and 16,248 cigarette exposure calls from September 2010 to February 2014. Among e-cigarette phone calls, 51.1 percent involved children 5 years or younger, while 42 percent of calls were for people 20 and older. "
The number 2,405 calls jumps out over four years (2010 to 2014), or about six hundred a year.
But then I looked a bit more closely at my first research.
Why, its a set of statistics only for the Washington DC metro area only. DC Metro, according to Wikipedia, has around 6,000,000 million people, or less than 1/50th of the US population.
So we have to multiply these numbers by 50 to get an idea of the national stats (I looked around on the CDC website but I could not find this kind of poisoning info in the same simple form).
So, the evil "Arts/Crafts/Office Supply" industry must poison about 447 x 50 or about 22,000 children each year.
As opposed to 600 or so for e-cigarette juice.
Of course, cosmetics (no safety caps there - and no doubt the epitomy of evil for its lack of concern about child safety), poisons a mere 125,000 or so children each year in my estimation.
One hundred and twenty five thousand.
A little quick math and we see that across all the types of poisoning listed there are probably at least 500,000 childhood poisonings reported each year in the US.
Now if we assume that each e-cigarette user does at least one thing on the list above: uses a cleaner, or has plants, for example, we can see that, at 600 incidents per year, e-cigarette users are actually far more responsible with the e-juice than regular household items.
But no one thinks about this in this way, nor do they report it...
Perhaps the problem is that mom's (or dad's for that matter) makeup kit has no safety lock - hmmm, but that would make putting on makeup while in stop-and-go DC beltway traffic difficult - wouldn't it?
Plus who would feel empowered or chic by a make-up kit with a fiddly safety lock on it.
So all these reports on the dangers of e-juice are, to put it as kindly as possible, pure, absolute BS.
Sure, 600 poisonings is too many, but if you really wanted to save children you'd be thinking about safety caps on "cosmetics/personal care products" because tens of thousands of more children would be saved from poisoning.
(But then no one reports this on the news and that's not really politically correct, is it...?)
Childhood poisoning, if you look at the DC web page, has an upside. More than half of the incidents reported are handled over the phone, i.e., no one goes to the hospital. One imagines that this is also true for the e-juice poisoning as well (and though e-juice might say "Strawberry" on the bottle - which a five year old cannot read anyway - it surely does not taste like Strawberry - more like shit in my opinion). So while little Jr. might put it in his mouth I doubt it will stay there for long.
Childhood poisoning is no laughing matter.
But it would seem that news outlets think that its more responsible to pick on or bully ex-smokers (because that's what vapers are) than to actually care about what happens to "the children."
It's also on the nightly news: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/e-cigarette-poisonings-on-the-rise-cdc/.
So I was, of course, curious what the truth was.
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| Childhood poisoning |
My first research turned up this article where we find the following:
Looks kind of alarming, especially when you compare it to the CBS report above: "For the report, the CDC examined records of phone calls made to poison control centers regarding conventional cigarettes, e-cigarettes and nicotine liquid, with a total of 2,405 calls for e-cigarette and 16,248 cigarette exposure calls from September 2010 to February 2014. Among e-cigarette phone calls, 51.1 percent involved children 5 years or younger, while 42 percent of calls were for people 20 and older. "
The number 2,405 calls jumps out over four years (2010 to 2014), or about six hundred a year.
But then I looked a bit more closely at my first research.
Why, its a set of statistics only for the Washington DC metro area only. DC Metro, according to Wikipedia, has around 6,000,000 million people, or less than 1/50th of the US population.
So we have to multiply these numbers by 50 to get an idea of the national stats (I looked around on the CDC website but I could not find this kind of poisoning info in the same simple form).
So, the evil "Arts/Crafts/Office Supply" industry must poison about 447 x 50 or about 22,000 children each year.
As opposed to 600 or so for e-cigarette juice.
Of course, cosmetics (no safety caps there - and no doubt the epitomy of evil for its lack of concern about child safety), poisons a mere 125,000 or so children each year in my estimation.
One hundred and twenty five thousand.
A little quick math and we see that across all the types of poisoning listed there are probably at least 500,000 childhood poisonings reported each year in the US.
Now if we assume that each e-cigarette user does at least one thing on the list above: uses a cleaner, or has plants, for example, we can see that, at 600 incidents per year, e-cigarette users are actually far more responsible with the e-juice than regular household items.
But no one thinks about this in this way, nor do they report it...
Perhaps the problem is that mom's (or dad's for that matter) makeup kit has no safety lock - hmmm, but that would make putting on makeup while in stop-and-go DC beltway traffic difficult - wouldn't it?
Plus who would feel empowered or chic by a make-up kit with a fiddly safety lock on it.
So all these reports on the dangers of e-juice are, to put it as kindly as possible, pure, absolute BS.
Sure, 600 poisonings is too many, but if you really wanted to save children you'd be thinking about safety caps on "cosmetics/personal care products" because tens of thousands of more children would be saved from poisoning.
(But then no one reports this on the news and that's not really politically correct, is it...?)
Childhood poisoning, if you look at the DC web page, has an upside. More than half of the incidents reported are handled over the phone, i.e., no one goes to the hospital. One imagines that this is also true for the e-juice poisoning as well (and though e-juice might say "Strawberry" on the bottle - which a five year old cannot read anyway - it surely does not taste like Strawberry - more like shit in my opinion). So while little Jr. might put it in his mouth I doubt it will stay there for long.
Childhood poisoning is no laughing matter.
But it would seem that news outlets think that its more responsible to pick on or bully ex-smokers (because that's what vapers are) than to actually care about what happens to "the children."
Oops! Of the 2,400 cases of e-juice poisoning I mention, only 1/2 are children according to CBS...
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