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: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday November 09 2019, @01:53AM (10 children)
you mean this whole kerfluffle was a few bad actors selling on the black market, and not something inherent in Vaping? That's gonna poke a few holes in a few narratives.
Wonder if it will matter?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday November 09 2019, @02:25AM (4 children)
Yes, everybody in the vape industry - including the vapers themselves - know this whole "epidemic" is just a few people vaping shady juices made in someone's kitchen with stupid ingredients. But that won't poke holes in the narratives of Big Tobacco, Big Pharma or the government, because they really, REALLY want to legislate vaping out of existence, and this is a godsend for them. They have almost unlimited means to spread disinformation and bad PR, they'd done so for years with good success, and they'll exploit this incident for all its worth to put the final nail in the coffin - and the vaping industry just won't be able to resist the media shitstorm.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Saturday November 09 2019, @03:30AM (3 children)
E-Cigarettes [opensecrets.org]
Altria (Phillip Morris) owns 35% of Juul.
Vuse, the #2 ecig manufacturer, is owned by a company actually called 'British American Tobacco.' (formerly R.J. Reynolds)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @04:44AM (1 child)
Beat me to it. When I found this out, everything sort of clicked into place about the vape narrative. Juul is Republican Party. Ergo, the Democratic Party must oppose vaping. It also makes Juul's bad behavior make sense, they're Republicans after all so what do you expect. What is the moderate position?
(Score: 2) by cykros on Monday November 11 2019, @04:06PM
This explains why Trump is after tougher regulations on vaping; as with most things, he's just a badly behaved Democrat in disguise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @06:28AM
Extend, Embrace, Extinguish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @02:45AM (2 children)
That's why we need to make weed illegal again - get it off the shelves and onto the streets where nobody can see it or test it or QA it. Create a perfect utopia. Again.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @03:00AM (1 child)
Antisocial nerdy incels can't talk to a drug dealer or enter any kind of utopia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @04:20AM
You forgot to bold incel.
Btw, tell us how expunging cannabis convictions, which very disproportionately affects people of color, actually reifies the racism of musky tech incels who need NORML Libertarian dude weed lmao to get high.
But maybe you're just a racist, and incarceration of people of color is a feature to you, not a bug.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @03:01AM (1 child)
No it will not matter. Juul will be crushed, vaping will be banned.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 09 2019, @04:05AM
There are 2 major problems soccer-moms have with vaping. The first is the flavors. Peach, grape, passionfruit, or menthol flavors that attract the underage to vaping due to their candy-like flavors.
So what needs to be done, and what I believe Juul already did, is stop selling the flavored shite outright so parents won't have excuses to bitch. Unfortunately, Blacks are huge consumers of flavored nicotine and asking them to drop the flavors is like asking them to pick up their pants.
The second problem, which will never be fixed unless it counteracts the first, is the stealth-mode with regards to how vaping doesn't stink up the place and they can be smoked discretely inside non-smoking buildings. To correct that problem would be to place stinky and/or long-lasting additives in the oils. Or do something even stupider, like have a loud un-disablable beep whenever a puff is taken.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @02:57AM (3 children)
They also need to see how many people who did not get ill were also exposed. Eg, everyone who got ill also drank water, therefore it was due to the water.
And anyway, this is just idiopathic (unexplained) pnemonia. Now since vaping got popular they started blaming it on that since so many people with pneumonia who tested negative for bacteria, etc also happened to vape.
(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]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @04:36PM (4 children)
Which is why we need to legalize all psychoactive substances to ensure the safety of products on the market.
Having a large black market for these substances seriously increases the risks of injury or death. Not just WRT vaping THC, but also black market opiods, fake "Molly" and others.
Just as we've done many times before, we take a deliberative approach. We investigate, gather information, identify the issues and risks, then choose the "solution" that causes the most harm and does the least good.
What a shame.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @05:45PM (3 children)
No, it isn't. This is just the cdc reclassifying unexplained pneumonia as vaping illness. Probably some political or financial notice behind it, but not could just be incompetence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @06:09PM
Twin autocorrect.. Lol, fuckin got turned into twin.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:20AM (1 child)
From where did you receive your medical degree? At which pulmonary program did you do your residency?
Thought so.
As such, I'll take the CDC's word over yours. Every. Single. Time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @01:49AM
Actually I do have a phd in a medical field, but consider it pretty much worthless.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @08:41PM
My brother occasionally vapes. At one time he did it more regularly and it did cause him difficulty breathing so he slowed down. He's pretty sure it was from the vaping. I'm pretty sure nothing of his was ever bought from the black market but I wouldn't know if it contains Vitamin E Acetate. I may ask him later on now that I read this.