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The Wasington Post has a report on the FDA investigation into illnesses and lung damage caused by vaping.
State and federal health officials investigating mysterious lung illnesses linked to vaping have found the same chemical in samples of marijuana products used by people sickened in different parts of the country and who used different brands of products in recent weeks.
[...] That same chemical was also found in nearly all cannabis samples from patients who fell ill in New York in recent weeks, a state health department spokeswoman said. While this is the first common element found in samples from across the country, health officials said it is too early to know whether this is causing the injuries.
[...] State and federal health authorities have said they are focusing on the role of contaminants or counterfeit substances as a likely cause of vaping-related lung illnesses. Many patients have told officials and clinicians that they bought cannabis products off the street.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @04:29AM (2 children)
This is the MSM. They don't publish news and certainly not objective analysis. They publish propaganda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @04:50AM
Look at what the case definition is: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6836e2.htm [cdc.gov]
So basically if you have idiopathic pneumonia, and vaped sometime the last 3 months, you have a confirmed case of vaping illness. What percent of 15- 40 year olds have vaped at least once in the last 90 days? Probably at like half, so they have seen only a couple hundred cases out of these tens of millions of vapers.
This is total BS. There has been no rise in cases of pneumonia, they are just moving some from the unexplained category to "vaping illness" for no legitimate reason.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @04:57AM
A better post:
Much of medicine seems to be based on politics, fads, and clickbait to me. Eg, the vaping scare the CDC is currently causing. They basically took:
1) An unexplained medical issue (idiopathic pneumonia)
2) A new yet very common behavior (vaping)
Then linked the two to cause a scare. Look at the definition, basically any unexplained case of pneumonia in a person who vaped in the last 90 days gets called “confirmed vaping illness”[1].
Lets say the population at risk is primarily 15-40 year olds,[2] which is about 100 million people in the US.[3] Lets also say that about 30% of them vaped in the last 90 days.[4] Then we have about 1000 cases[2] per 30 million vapers or about 3/100k. Before vaping was a thing, the prevalence of just one type of idiopathic pneumonia was estimated at ~0.4 to 8 cases per 100k.[5]
So there does not seem to be a meaningful increase in the symptoms, only in vaping. And anyway 3 per 100k is pretty low risk activity. For comparison, 50 per 100k die from some kind of accident.[6] So the average person is ~10x more likely to die from just going about their life than to even get a case of this pneumonia (~1000x for dying from it).
Fine… disagree with the numbers which are all rough guesses. But why doesn’t the CDC present us with a common sense analysis like this?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease/health-departments/index.html#case-definitions [cdc.gov]
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html [cdc.gov]
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Uspop.svg [wikipedia.org]
[4] https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/monitoring-future-survey-high-school-youth-trends [drugabuse.gov]
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16088690 [nih.gov]
[6] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm [cdc.gov]