“ELECTRONIC cigarettes will be a revolution in tobacco harm reduction”
This was the statement made yesterday by Dr. Konstatinos Farsalinos, speaking to the Philippine E-Cigarette Industry Association (PECIA) Inc. after reading Philippine FDA Advisory 2003-015 entitled “Secondary Exposure to E-Cigarette Emission Might Be Harmful to Health.”
The FDA advisory is based on the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) Unit Cancer Prevention, Heidelberg publication which Dr. Farsalinos described as “not a new study but a review of other studies.”
“The German Cancer Research Center did not study anything themselves, and, in most cases, presented the other studies in a wrong way,” he said.
Dr. Farsalinos is a cardiologist, working as an independent researcher at Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center in Athens-Greece and at Medical Imaging Research Center, University Hospital Gathuisberg in Leuven-Belgium. He has been conducting scientific and clinical research on electronic cigarette the past three years and is a leading authority on the subject. His latest published study found that electronic cigarette vapor was at least 795% less toxic than cigarette smoke on cultured cells. He will be presenting his recent findings on electronic cigarette at the European Society of Cardiology annual congress on August 31.
Dr. Farsalinos said the FDA probably used the German publication conclusions without reading the real data carefully. As an example, he mentioned that the amount of fine particles from a tobacco cigarette is 25-90 times higher than from the electronic cigarette. And even the level set by the Philippines government is 2 times higher than that found in electronic cigarettes. “The pharmaceutical industry is completely against electronic cigarette as it will destroy the smoking-cessation market.”
He urged Filipino men of science and medicine to use science to fight ignorance and fear. For example, he cited propylene glycol which is used in electronic cigarettes. “Propylene glycol has received a lot of criticism but it has been studied since 1947 and has no adverse effect in animals exposed to huge quantities on air. In fact, it has antibacterial properties. None have found anything different since then besides some mild short-term irritation which does not cause long-term disease.”
“Scientists should be at the front discussing with words that are simple to understand for the public but at the same time are scientific. Moreover, if someone has done his own research, then he expresses an opinion about something he knows very well. The FDA has done no study, but they should evaluate all available studies more carefully before making any conclusions. And, most importantly, they should learn what an electronic cigarette is and how it works.
“All this talk about the dangers of electronic cigarette is not substantiated by scientific evidence” Dr. Farsalinos said.
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