Taking a stance sharply at odds with most American public health officials, a major British medical organization urged smokers to switch to electronic cigarettes, saying they are the best hope in generations for people addicted to tobacco cigarettes to quit.The recommendation, laid out in a report published Thursday by the Royal College of Physicians, summarizes the growing body of science on e-cigarettes and finds that their benefits far outweigh the potential harms.It concludes resoundingly that, at least so far, the devices are helping people more than harming them, and that the worries about them — including that using them will lead young people to eventually start smoking traditional cigarettes — have not come to pass.“This is the first genuinely new way of helping people stop smoking that has come along in decades,” said John Britton, director of the U.K.Center for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies at the University of Nottingham, who led the committee that produced the report.

E-cigarettes, he said, “have the potential to help half or more of all smokers get off cigarettes.That’s a huge health benefit, bigger than just about any medical intervention.”That conclusion is likely to be controversial in the United States, where arguments about e-cigarettes have jolted the traditionally low-key public health community.E-cigarettes deliver nicotine without the harmful tar and chemicals that cause cancer.Some public health experts see e-cigarettes as the first real chance in years for 40 million addicted Americans to quit.But others, including the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have focused on the potential dangers of e-cigarettes, for example that they could extend smoking habits, that they could be a gateway to traditional cigarettes for children, or that their vapor could to turn out to have long-term health effects.“These guys, in my view, are going off a cliff,” said Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California who has been outspoken in his criticism of e-cigarettes.

“They are taking England into a series of policies that five years from now they all will really regret.They are turning England into this giant experiment on behalf of the tobacco industry.”But some American public health experts applauded the report, saying the emphasis on policies that reduce harm, such as recommending that smokers try e-cigarettes or giving clean needles to drug users, would probably save more lives.“This is two countries taking pretty much diametrically opposed positions,” said Kenneth E. Warner, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.e cigarette mississauga“One is focused exclusively on the hypothetical risks, none of which have been established.e cigarette lskThe other is focusing on potential benefits.”He added, “The British are saying, ‘Let’s see how we can help the main smokers today, who by the way are largely poor and less educated, and let’s not focus so much on kids, who may or may not be sickened by this 40 years down the line.’ ” Smoking is still the largest cause of preventable death in the United States, with more than 480,000 people a year dying of smoking-related illnesses.e cigarette ipv4

In past decades, smoking was spread throughout society, but today in Britain and the United States, smokers tend to be poor, less educated, or mentally ill.E-cigarettes, now a multibillion-dollar market, have gained popularity faster than the federal government has managed to regulate them.The Food and Drug Administration has not yet published final rules that would subject them to federal oversight.A spokesman for the C.D.C.said the agency would not comment on any report other than its own.e cigarette 1100mah battery ukHe reiterated the C.D.C.e cigarette smoke tricksposition on e-cigarettes: “There is currently no conclusive scientific evidence supporting the use of e-cigarettes as a safe and effective cessation tool at the population level.e cigarette utilisation

The science thus far indicates most e-cigarette users continue to smoke conventional cigarettes.”But the report cites evidence from Britain that e-cigarettes have helped with quitting.Robert West, director of Tobacco Studies at University College London, analyzed monthly household survey data going back to 2009 in England, and concluded that use of an e-cigarette during an attempt to quit was associated with a 50 percent increase in the chances of success, compared with using no aid or using a product such as nicotine patches without any professional counseling.He estimated that around 20,000 smokers in England quit smoking in 2014 because of e-cigarettes.Professor Glantz cited his recent analysis as evidence that e-cigarettes in fact reduce the chances someone will quit smoking.The Royal College of Physicians is a respected doctors’ group that helps set medical standards in Britain.It issued a groundbreaking report on the dangers of smoking in 1962 that was seen as the precursor of the American surgeon general’s report of 1964 that linked smoking with cancer.

The organization’s last major report on reducing harm from tobacco use came out in 2007, before e-cigarettes became mainstream, and its authors said the new one was an attempt to evaluate their benefits and harms.The report walks through a decade of science, listing studies that find in favor of e-cigarettes as well as studies that do not.It asserts that e-cigarettes are only 5 percent as harmful as traditional cigarettes, a conclusion that some American experts say has been lost in the United States in the rush to condemn e-cigarettes.It states bluntly that long-term effects of nicotine are likely to be minimal.“The emergence of e-cigarettes has generated a massive opportunity for a consumer as well as a health care-led revolution in the way that nicotine is used in society,” the report said.As the technology of e-cigarettes improves, “so the vision of a society that is free from tobacco smoking, and the harm that smoking causes, becomes more realistic.”Vapor from electronic cigarettes contains two previously undiscovered cancer-causing chemicals, according to a new study.

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found propylene glycol, an eye and respiratory irritant, and glycerin, a skin, eye and respiratory irritant, among 29 other chemicals released in e-cigarette vapor.Both are considered “probable carcinogens” by federal health officials.They’re used in e-cigarettes to create artificial smoke.Decomposition of those chemicals, caused by heating them inside an e-cig, also releases toxic chemicals such as acrolein and formaldehyde, according to published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.“Advocates of e-cigarettes say emissions are much lower than from conventional cigarettes, so you’re better off using e-cigarettes,” Hugo Destaillats, the study’s author and Berkeley Lab researcher, said in a statement.“I would say, that may be true for certain users — for example, long time smokers that cannot quit — but the problem is, it doesn’t mean that they’re healthy.Regular cigarettes are super unhealthy.

E-cigarettes are just unhealthy,” he said.Researchers simulated “vaping” with three types of “e-liquids” in two vaporizers operated at different battery settings.The higher the temperature inside the vaporizer’s heating coil, the more chemicals were emitted.E-cigs with one heating coil instead of two released higher amounts of chemicals because the coil was hotter, the study found.And puffs taken at different times released varying amounts of chemicals, the research showed.Vapes taken while an e-cig was heating up released lower levels of chemicals than when the device was used at a “steady state” with constant heat.Previous studies have already shown e-cigarettes emit toxic chemicals.The warned that some e-cigarettes emit diethylene glycol, a chemical used in antifreeze.A 2015  found e-cigs give off formaldehyde, another carcinogen.And e-cigarette use has spiked in the United States.More than 13 percent of middle and high school students in 2014 had used an e-cigarette, triple the number that had used them the year before, .