12 ms·

A Vaping Illness That’s ‘Becoming an Epidemic’

238 points by mhb 7y ago

adanto6840 7y ago
Only tangentially relevant, but does anyone have any insight on how applicable this broader topic might (or not) be to the "essential oil" industry? Specifically talking about the business of "essential oil diffusers" and the sales of essential oils. From my understanding, the diffusers are largely akin to ultrasonic humidifiers containing oil instead of water (though several forms of diffuser exist including ultrasonic, evaporative, heat, etc) -- which I would imagine is basically just putting oil into the air for later inhalation... The article mentions several times, and somewhat unsurprisingly, that the inhalation of oil is not good for you or for the health of human lungs. Is this the case with all types & classes of oils (ie "essential oils"), or are oils used for vaping specifically bad/worse, or is there just not much data on the broader topic of inhalation of atomized oils yet? I've read the relevant Wikipedia articles and read through the studies/sources that are freely available, but if anyone has any further insight or knowledge I'd really love to better understand it. FWIW, my personal guess would be that the inhalation of most any non-gaseous matter is probably bad for you -- but if there's any science/data out there on it I'd love to hear about it.
- grenoire 7y ago
  I think concentration and magnitude is key. Frying definitely vaporises oils into the air but it doesn't seem to be causing lung issues.
  - bhouston 7y ago
    I believe there are heath issues with frying oil. Just the first Google hit... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4881732/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4881732/ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/food-drink/bad-fry-news-frying-food-can-cause-dangerous-lung-damage/19/11/ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/food-drink/bad-fry-news-fr... And a meta-analysis: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.researchgate.net/publication/225283274_Cooking_Oil_Fumes_and_Lung_Cancer_A_Review_of_the_Literature_in_the_Context_of_the_US_Population/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.researchgate.net/publicatio...
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    Breathing the smoke and grease from frying is definitely not good for you. That’s one reason kitchens tend to have serious ventilation. But people accept a certain amount of risk, since everyone needs to eat and cooking is a career for many people. Cooking is nowhere near as dangerous as smoking cigarettes.
    - vastoi 7y ago
      Most cooks I know do both unfortunately
      - mastazi 7y ago
        Do we have reliable data about the incidence of smoking among cooks and food preparation workers? How does it compare to the general population? Smoking is supposed to affect negatively your ability to recognise taste and smell, which are very important if you work in a kitchen but, at the same time, I too know several people who are in that line of business and are smokers.
        gambiting 7y ago
        You know why? Because all the chefs I know say the same thing - smoking is the only way to get any sort of break while in the kitchen, going outside and standing still doing nothing for 5 minutes is not acceptable, but somehow going out and smoking for 5 minutes is absolutely ok in most kitchens. I know some people who picked up smoking only to have an extra break at work. On the plus side, I also know someone who bought himself an e-cig and somehow buys "blank"(saline/water filled) cartridges for it, just so he can have a short break but without any side effects of actually smoking.
        vastoi 7y ago
        Honestly, depending on the establishment you work in, your sense of taste and smell don’t matter much as a line cook or a regular prep employee. You are outputting dozens of the same dish repeatedly in the same order with the same ratio of ingredients. More of an assembly line with a series of predetermined steps than a creative expression through food. A batch of soup may be tasted once at the beginning of the shift when it is prepared but it usually isn’t being checked on the fly.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    You usually don’t fry for the entire day. The diffusers spew stuff 24x7 in many cases, and folks try to inhale as much as possible for the quack health and wellness benefits. That said, the “oils” are pretty dilute.
- algesten 7y ago
  Without knowing for sure, I guess the concentration makes a big difference. Many things are toxic in high doses. The purpose of a vaper is to get as much oil in your lungs as possible. Not sure that compares to an essential oil diffuser.
  - devoply 7y ago
    With essential oils you put a few drops into something like 300ml of water. So the amount of oil getting to your lungs in a large room out of that few drops of oil is pretty trivial. Maybe say you get one drop of oil exposure, over 4 hours. I doubt lungs have much trouble clearing that out.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- unvs 7y ago
  I bought an Awair some months ago, having been diagnosed with Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency and slightly freaking out, I wanted to have a bit more data on my living conditions. It measures PM2.5, VOCs, humidity, CO2 and temperature. Luckily my indoor air quality was pretty good, except for low humidity. The Awair app kept nagging me to get a humidifier, so I relented and bought one. Just some minutes after switching it on, the PM2.5 skyrocketed! I googled for answers, and found out that Awair warned about this: https://blog.getawair.com/awair-investigates-how-your-humidifiers-water-affects-your-health https://blog.getawair.com/awair-investigates-how-your-humidi... The humidifier was spewing crap out into my air! I switched to distilled water and the measurements were OK again, but a bit scary to see how bad it was with regular tap water.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > Luckily my indoor air quality was pretty good, except for low humidity. What's the problem supposed to be with low humidity? All of the humidity-related problems I know of, including discomfort, come from high humidity.
    - pessimizer 7y ago
      In my experience, dry, cracked lips, asthma attacks, and a stuffed-up nose. The reason that humidifiers are a business is because low humidity can be uncomfortable.
    - geerlingguy 7y ago
      If you have sensitive or dry skin, or something like eczema, it can (usually over long periods of time) cause some pretty severe issues if you don’t have enough humidity.
    - GuB-42 7y ago
      Discomfort due to dry air is a major problem in airplanes. You may already have experienced it. One of the main reasons why they recirculate some air instead of making it an open circuit is to conserve moisture. Outside air at high altitude is extremely dry. Moisturizers could be used but that would require heavy and therefore expensive water tanks.
- pknight 7y ago
  You naturally inhale essential oils when you walk through a forest and some of those (i.e. phytoncides) have been studied and linked to a range of positive health benefits, by for instance boosting immune system function and reducing negative stress. Those health effects have been reproduced by adding wood essential oils in the air of indoor environments. Example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20074458 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20074458 However, different essential oils may have adverse effects as well and it seems like this is definitely understudied. It wasn't until I started looking into essential oils that I realized that almost every type of commercially available essential oil is toxic to cats. I would exercise extreme caution when using diffusers and stick to the few essential oils that have been well studied and considered safe for humans & pets.
- mastazi 7y ago
  Just one relevant bit of information: in “classic” vaping (the one where the goal is to inhale nicotine through the use of liquid “e-juice”) there are no oils involved whatsoever, in fact vapers who make DIY juice, actively avoid any ingredient that contains any kind of vegetable oil in their composition (which is unfortunately often the case with some types of food flavouring). This is because oils could combust and combustion is the very thing people want to avoid when switching from smoking to vaping. I’ve heard that there are other forms of vaping where e.g. cannabis oil is involved but that type of device works very differently and has nothing to do with “nicotine e-juice” vaping. (Edit: the NYT article is just conflating many separate phenomena under the umbrella term “vaping” which is very unfortunate). PS Ex smoker and ex vaper here (I went from smoking to vaping to quitting everything, couldn’t have done it without vaping), I‘m fairly technical since I was involved in DIY juice making and device “modding” so hit me if you have questions.
  - posterboy 7y ago
    Yes you could have done it without vaping. Yes, you didn't do it, but that's no proof.
    - mastazi 7y ago
      When I look back at my personal story I don’t look for proof, I look at my past experiences and decide that something has value to me. If proof is what you’re looking for, scientific studies about the effects of vaping abound.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    It is a bit of a stretch to say there are no oils involved whatsoever. Glycerol/glycerin is almost always produced from triglycerides such as vegetable oil. (Edit: as the article states, the potential for left over oil from this process being present in the glycerol is one of the causes being explored) Additionally, I believe the flashpoint for glycerol is lower than most vegetable oils so your argument doesn't make sense.
- kortex 7y ago
  Search for "`chemical name` msds". You may need to look for the specific chemical name [1] rather than trade name. You should be able to find an occupational safety limit, lower exposure limit, or similarly worded section, which tells you how much (roughly) you can be safely (roughly) exposed to per unit time, usually 8 hour workday. Anything that isn't air doesn't belong in your lungs. Period. Some things are less bad than others. However diffusers are unlikely to increase the concentration to harmful levels for healthy individuals. As an asthmatic though, I can definitely feel it when lots of diffusers are running. [1] http://www.chemspider.com/ http://www.chemspider.com/
phillipseamore 7y ago
Vaping has much more history in Asia and Europe and seems to be without cases like this. The products from the cigarette industry aren't very prevalent in those contintents and also not vaping of THC and other such fluids. That plus the limited geography and timeframe seems to point only to contaimated juice.
- userbinator 7y ago
  Yes, a good investigation would be to analyse what all of these people vaped, and if they all came from a common source.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - nannal 7y ago
    I'm 90% sure they just gave right up when they figured they'd vaped. what else do they have in common, that's what I'd like to know, maybe they'd eaten that day, or consumed water.
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      I don't think that is how the CDC works...
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Which is exactly what's happening at this moment.
- slovenlyrobot 7y ago
  I've been vaping for about 10 years and would be happy to see tighter regulation of juices. Some of the stuff available is scary, and the purity is always up for question. There simply isn't any framework for this kind of thing yet. It's not all that surprising people are getting injured
  - 7y ago
ptest1 7y ago
I believe these vaping cases are from using elicit, underground THC vaping products and not the usual e-cigarette / nicotine vaping we usually associate with the word “vaping.” There’s some details over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette/comments/cxov1b/no_one_needs_to_read_this_but_i_need_a_place_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette/comments/cxov1...
- mastazi 7y ago
  Yeah I wish the article gave more details instead of just spreading FUD
  - sneak 7y ago
    Lethal FUD, as vaping standard PG+VG+nicotine mixtures without adulterants is orders of magnitude safer than smoking.
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      On what basis do you know this?
      - eurasiantiger 7y ago
        People have been vaping for a decade. There is no epidemic of vape-related pulmonary issues anywhere else than in the US right now. Smoking kills over eight million people every year, 480,000 of them in the US alone. Even if the current epidemic turns out to be global, vaping is still several orders of magnitude less lethal.
        shkkmo 7y ago
        Given how long smoking was deemed to be safe, what studies have you seen that show that vaping hasn't and won't turn out to have long term health effects on par with smoking? A decade is not a very long time to run the kind of large scale longitudinal studies that are needed to accurately gauge long term health effects. Making significant claims about the long term safety of e-cigs without this data seems quite irresponsible. Edit: lots of downvotes but still nobody actually willing to provide evidence for these ridiculous "several orders of magnitude safer" claims.
sandworm101 7y ago
I'm in the military. Some cadets visited our unit recently and I dropped in to say hi. One of them, a 13yo, asked about using a Juul while on duty. Our tour guide didn't know what a Juul was. Then a dozen kids showed him. Maybe 1/4 of the cadet group were carrying the devices.
- oyebenny 7y ago
  After seeing them, what was his or her reply?
- callalex 7y ago
  This has a HUGE sampling bias of only 13-year-olds that end up in a military recruitment program while still being the age of a child.
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    Cadets /= "a military recruitment program". Cadets are more like the boy scouts, at least what scouts were a few generations ago. It is more like a summer camp where, if you are the best camper, you get to go on a helicopter ride on the last day of camp.
    - atlasunshrugged 7y ago
      Does cadets = JROTC?
      - sandworm101 7y ago
        Maybe in the US. There are other countries on this planet.
kappi 7y ago
I don't know how founders and investors of vaping startup sleep with blood in their hands. Outside this epidemic, there is real epidemic among school students making an entire future generation of adults addicted to nicotine.
- wahern 7y ago
  1) Vaping is far safer than smoking, and I applaud any efforts, profit-seeking or otherwise, that induce smokers to switch to vaping now. And though some claim that e-cigarettes didn't hasten the decline of cigarette smoking, and are possibly slowing it, if you look at the data you can't make that inference. In fact, if you look at the data it's just as possible that vaping was hastening the long-term decline. The problem is that of those who claim to both vape and smoke cigarettes, nobody is reporting the ratios--are they vaping in addition to smoking the same number of cigarettes, mostly vaping but smoking a few cigarettes each week, etc? 2) The source for the epidemic of vaping comes from the yearly youth drug survey. And if you look at the survey results, youths are experimenting with vaping in the same numbers as marijuana. And just like with marijuana, the activity is mostly only once or twice a week, not daily smokers. Where's the concern about the "epidemic" of pot smoking among youth? There's ample evidence that smoking pot is much more harmful for youth, both for their mental and physical development.
- bubblesorting 7y ago
  On a bed made of money :(
- idDriven 7y ago
  Would you tell people that are on SSRI antidepressants that they are addicted to antidepressant medication?
ng12 7y ago
This is a casualty of state governments dragging their feet when it comes to legalization. You can get very "legit looking" THC cartridges very easily where I live (New York). They're Chinese-made copies of legit dispensary brands which are then filled with whatever junk. It doesn't surprise me at all that some of them are tainted.
- velox_io 7y ago
  I find it interesting that the article is targeting vaping in general rather than buying tainted products. (My money is on THC extraction using Butane that is meant for fuel (that's heavily contaminated) rather than lab-grade/ pure.)
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    > I find it interesting that the article is targeting vaping in general rather than buying tainted products. Yea, I don't vape anything but I think it's a pretty fascinating public health issue and I'm very interested in potential developments in our understanding of its health impacts. I read the first couple of paragraphs and realized that the article has little to do with what its headline implies. I suppose I should've known better than to credulously read a headline from a clickbait rag like the NYT.
  - dqpb 7y ago
    I find it interesting that this is news at all - Idiot intentionally inhales particulates into lungs. Experiences negative health effects.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    Seems unlikely, though IANAChemist. Butane is a volatile (BP ~0 centigrade) short-chain hydrocarbon, and its isomers would likely (?) be similar. Contaminants of butane might be what? If they were longer chained they'd be less volatile but still disappear quickly. If they were long enough to hang around to mess up lungs then they'd probably not vapourise well in the first place so wouldn't make good solvents. Just a guess though.
ghostpepper 7y ago
> But vaping has its own problems: To become inhalable, nicotine or THC, the high-inducing chemical in marijuana, must be mixed with solvents that dissolve and deliver the drugs. This is not strictly true; there are vaporizers that take regular dried cannabis buds and deliver THC. No chemicals are involved.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
Maybe I'm showing my age but it brings back memories of Legionnaires Disease.
kerkeslager 7y ago
The actual number of cases isn't given, only a minimum: > Dr. Pirzada is one of the many physicians across the country treating patients — now totaling more than 215 — with mysterious and life-threatening vaping-related illnesses this summer. 215 is a much smaller number than I would have guessed based on that headline, and it's also an oddly-specific number to just say, "More than" with. This stinks of sensationalism. Shame on you, New York Times, you're better than this. Why does it matter? Vaping only has to be a tiny bit healthier than smoking and prevent a small percentage of people from smoking, to save "more than 215" lives. The research into the effects of vaping doesn't seem to be conclusive, so I don't know yet whether vaping is safer, or by how much. But when research does come to some concusions, I want public policy with regard to vaping to be written based on facts viewed in context, not sensationalized fearmongering.
- TylerE 7y ago
  Don't think it's a weird number. i would certainly hope they know _exactly_ how many cases have actually presented - plus there will always be some more that never see a doctor's office.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    If they know _exactly_ how many cases have presented, then they could have said _exactly_ how many cases have presented, instead of saying "more than 215". And this is the number of cases, it's the number of patients. You're not a patient until you see a doctor, so that doesn't include people who don't see a doctor. There are a lot of numbers that are more than 215, but with such a specific number, it makes me think that the number is something like 217, and they just said "more than 215" to sensationalize it. And to be clear, 215 cases in a nation the size of the US is not "becoming an epidemic".
aaron695 7y ago
This is obviously hysteria. Perhaps, in this case there is an underlying issue that is bigger than thought. But this shit shouldn't be rocket science. If there is a issue with vaping it will be across the world in an even distribution, also even over time. This also goes with contaminates! We can't suddenly be getting spikes from contaminates in states miles apart. At best, person Z is causing the issue, lives in state X and has a GF in state Y, this might cause a blip. But it won't be a scatter shot. If it spread on the internet, perhaps, but it's on the internet, it's findable. I'd guess the current scattershot is cause by hysteria mixed with hospitals incompetence not reporting valid info as they should. Why are people not horrified their hospitals can't figure this out? The open info possibly is almost enough to get a good idea, is it happening overseas? What's the underlying mechanism, or are we truly that stupid we don't understand how lungs work at all. Piece it all together. And stop calling it lung disease, I don't care if it's technically correct, this is not what it's called in common spoken English.
cannaceo 7y ago
As someone who has experience in this industry I can point to the cause. Biomass ("trim") was very easy to source leading up to CA recreational legalization in 2018. For those of you who don't know the majority of cannabis nationally comes from CA and OR. Legalization brought with it enforcement against unlicensed NorCal farms that drastically reduced supply. This was amplified by the massive overproduction of the 2017 market that had many farmers leave the market due to extremely low prices. This is evidenced by the shutdown of soil/grow supply warehouses throughout NorCal. By February 2019 the last of the October 2018 harvest had been processed to distillate. Many operators started reprocessing waste material. At the same time, distillate started to make it's way over from Mexico. There is a drought of product in the black market but wholesale buyers were reluctant to pay higher prices after becoming accustomed to the low prices of 2018. In the beginning unscrupulous sellers started diluting their product by 60%. Buyers eventually caught on to the charade and started paying attention to the reduced viscosity of the oil as an indicator of cutting agents. Sellers countered this by adding thickening agents. Now you have an illicit market with high demand, not enough supply, and customers that represent established black markets across the country that don't want to pay a risk premium for oil. The cutting agents themselves are expensive so people have started making their own. Now people are getting sick from the cutting agents.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  This comment was great, until the last sentence. What is your basis for that claim? Do you know of some particular cutting agent that causes these symptoms? Speculation should not be presented as fact. We don't know what is causing these cases but you have presented a reasonable hypothesis.
  - cannaceo 7y ago
    None of these cutting agents are approved for human inhalation and no studies will be done. From an epidemiological perspective these cases are tightly clustered both temporally and location wise which really limits the possibilities. Common cutting agents in the licensed market are PEG200, PEG300, and MCT oil. None are those are proven safe from what I know. In the black market the initial cutting agent was PEG600. Then TrueTerpenes came out with Viscosity ( https://trueterpenes.com/products/diluent/viscosity-extract-liquifier/ https://trueterpenes.com/products/diluent/viscosity-extract-... ). Initially they said it was all terpenes (simple alcohols found in cannabis responsible for some effects and flavor) to sell it. It later came out that it was "mineral oil" but the reality is no one knows exactly what it is but it's a petroleum-based product of some kind. There was backlash against TrueTerpenes for this but selling mineral oil at $1500/liter (price point for cutting agents) is profitable. Some reports have described the symptoms as consistent with lipid pneumonia. Next FloraPlex released their thickening agent. Then HoneyCutt. I started hearing stories of people selling 0% THC epoxies to unsuspecting buyers as distillate starting a few months ago. Now there are people making their own thickening agents. Is it a theory? Yes. I'm normally scientifically conservative but I'd place a friendly wager on this one.
rgejman 7y ago
I remain cautiously pessimistic because there are two main possibilities: (1) there is one product (or a series of products manufactured/purified in the same way) that causes respiratory failure in many or all users, (2) all vaping products have a low level risk of causing respiratory failure. I don't think there is enough data to make a conclusion yet, but I am worried this will end up being a low-level persistent problem with vaping products—bootleg or not—for the rest of our lives. Maybe the culprit truly is dirty oil based extraction of THC... but if so, that will remains a problem for as long as there is no regulation of the official market as well as an operating black market. OTOH we may end up with a situation like we have in the world of muscle builder / hormone supplements where most people are fine but some users get really sick (e.g. deer hormones sold at regular stores causing severe kidney injury), but not enough of them get sick to get the CDC/FDA involved. I've seen those cases in the hospital and the patients are always confused as to how this could happen because they got the supplement from a vitamin store. With respect to some of the European posters below who have been using vape products for years: I would not be surprised if there were health consequences to those devices that had not been identified in Europe. The US has one of the best disease identifying-apparatuses in the world (the Centers for Disease Control) and a tradition of surveillance and reporting that is unparalleled. If a substance is harmful to health, it's got a better chance of being found here than anywhere else.
taurath 7y ago
This is all weed pens and concentrates right?
- Forge36 7y ago
  Local news said "89% report using products which contained THC" I've not seen it stated online
usrlocaletc 7y ago
Mass hysteria / moral panic perhaps? Isn't the greater, real threats are people are inhaling massive quantities of nicotine and propylene glycol, and not sufficiently cleaning their atomizers?
Redoubts 7y ago
I'd like to remind everyone of the trial of Tim Heidecker, which was a case similar to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWotb3gci0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWotb3gci0A
- pram 7y ago
  He was fully exonerated though!
  - tabs_masterrace 7y ago
    common don't spoil the ending like this
- dbtqgoat 7y ago
  Holy fuck haha
mikkelam 7y ago
I vape dry herb, should i be worried?
AltmousGadfly 7y ago
We already know exactly what's causing this, and it has nothing to do with THC or vape juice (vegetable glycerin). These people are vaping grey market THC carts. Grey market being the operative word, because the process used to make wax relies on using butane and other heavy solvents to dissolve the plant while keeping the THC intact. These small, backyard producers are dumb as shit and don't know how to properly remove the solvents.

238 points by mhb 7y ago

Only tangentially relevant, but does anyone have any insight on how applicable this broader topic might (or not) be to the "essential oil" industry? Specifically talking about the business of "essential oil diffusers" and the sales of essential oils. From my understanding, the diffusers are largely akin to ultrasonic humidifiers containing oil instead of water (though several forms of diffuser exist including ultrasonic, evaporative, heat, etc) -- which I would imagine is basically just putting oil into the air for later inhalation... The article mentions several times, and somewhat unsurprisingly, that the inhalation of oil is not good for you or for the health of human lungs. Is this the case with all types & classes of oils (ie "essential oils"), or are oils used for vaping specifically bad/worse, or is there just not much data on the broader topic of inhalation of atomized oils yet? I've read the relevant Wikipedia articles and read through the studies/sources that are freely available, but if anyone has any further insight or knowledge I'd really love to better understand it. FWIW, my personal guess would be that the inhalation of most any non-gaseous matter is probably bad for you -- but if there's any science/data out there on it I'd love to hear about it.

grenoire 7y ago
I think concentration and magnitude is key. Frying definitely vaporises oils into the air but it doesn't seem to be causing lung issues.
- bhouston 7y ago
  I believe there are heath issues with frying oil. Just the first Google hit... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4881732/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4881732/ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/food-drink/bad-fry-news-frying-food-can-cause-dangerous-lung-damage/19/11/ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/food-drink/bad-fry-news-fr... And a meta-analysis: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.researchgate.net/publication/225283274_Cooking_Oil_Fumes_and_Lung_Cancer_A_Review_of_the_Literature_in_the_Context_of_the_US_Population/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.researchgate.net/publicatio...
- jacobolus 7y ago
  Breathing the smoke and grease from frying is definitely not good for you. That’s one reason kitchens tend to have serious ventilation. But people accept a certain amount of risk, since everyone needs to eat and cooking is a career for many people. Cooking is nowhere near as dangerous as smoking cigarettes.
  - vastoi 7y ago
    Most cooks I know do both unfortunately
    - mastazi 7y ago
      Do we have reliable data about the incidence of smoking among cooks and food preparation workers? How does it compare to the general population? Smoking is supposed to affect negatively your ability to recognise taste and smell, which are very important if you work in a kitchen but, at the same time, I too know several people who are in that line of business and are smokers.
      - gambiting 7y ago
        You know why? Because all the chefs I know say the same thing - smoking is the only way to get any sort of break while in the kitchen, going outside and standing still doing nothing for 5 minutes is not acceptable, but somehow going out and smoking for 5 minutes is absolutely ok in most kitchens. I know some people who picked up smoking only to have an extra break at work. On the plus side, I also know someone who bought himself an e-cig and somehow buys "blank"(saline/water filled) cartridges for it, just so he can have a short break but without any side effects of actually smoking.
      - vastoi 7y ago
        Honestly, depending on the establishment you work in, your sense of taste and smell don’t matter much as a line cook or a regular prep employee. You are outputting dozens of the same dish repeatedly in the same order with the same ratio of ingredients. More of an assembly line with a series of predetermined steps than a creative expression through food. A batch of soup may be tasted once at the beginning of the shift when it is prepared but it usually isn’t being checked on the fly.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  You usually don’t fry for the entire day. The diffusers spew stuff 24x7 in many cases, and folks try to inhale as much as possible for the quack health and wellness benefits. That said, the “oils” are pretty dilute.
algesten 7y ago
Without knowing for sure, I guess the concentration makes a big difference. Many things are toxic in high doses. The purpose of a vaper is to get as much oil in your lungs as possible. Not sure that compares to an essential oil diffuser.
- devoply 7y ago
  With essential oils you put a few drops into something like 300ml of water. So the amount of oil getting to your lungs in a large room out of that few drops of oil is pretty trivial. Maybe say you get one drop of oil exposure, over 4 hours. I doubt lungs have much trouble clearing that out.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
unvs 7y ago
I bought an Awair some months ago, having been diagnosed with Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency and slightly freaking out, I wanted to have a bit more data on my living conditions. It measures PM2.5, VOCs, humidity, CO2 and temperature. Luckily my indoor air quality was pretty good, except for low humidity. The Awair app kept nagging me to get a humidifier, so I relented and bought one. Just some minutes after switching it on, the PM2.5 skyrocketed! I googled for answers, and found out that Awair warned about this: https://blog.getawair.com/awair-investigates-how-your-humidifiers-water-affects-your-health https://blog.getawair.com/awair-investigates-how-your-humidi... The humidifier was spewing crap out into my air! I switched to distilled water and the measurements were OK again, but a bit scary to see how bad it was with regular tap water.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > Luckily my indoor air quality was pretty good, except for low humidity. What's the problem supposed to be with low humidity? All of the humidity-related problems I know of, including discomfort, come from high humidity.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    In my experience, dry, cracked lips, asthma attacks, and a stuffed-up nose. The reason that humidifiers are a business is because low humidity can be uncomfortable.
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    If you have sensitive or dry skin, or something like eczema, it can (usually over long periods of time) cause some pretty severe issues if you don’t have enough humidity.
  - GuB-42 7y ago
    Discomfort due to dry air is a major problem in airplanes. You may already have experienced it. One of the main reasons why they recirculate some air instead of making it an open circuit is to conserve moisture. Outside air at high altitude is extremely dry. Moisturizers could be used but that would require heavy and therefore expensive water tanks.
pknight 7y ago
You naturally inhale essential oils when you walk through a forest and some of those (i.e. phytoncides) have been studied and linked to a range of positive health benefits, by for instance boosting immune system function and reducing negative stress. Those health effects have been reproduced by adding wood essential oils in the air of indoor environments. Example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20074458 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20074458 However, different essential oils may have adverse effects as well and it seems like this is definitely understudied. It wasn't until I started looking into essential oils that I realized that almost every type of commercially available essential oil is toxic to cats. I would exercise extreme caution when using diffusers and stick to the few essential oils that have been well studied and considered safe for humans & pets.
mastazi 7y ago
Just one relevant bit of information: in “classic” vaping (the one where the goal is to inhale nicotine through the use of liquid “e-juice”) there are no oils involved whatsoever, in fact vapers who make DIY juice, actively avoid any ingredient that contains any kind of vegetable oil in their composition (which is unfortunately often the case with some types of food flavouring). This is because oils could combust and combustion is the very thing people want to avoid when switching from smoking to vaping. I’ve heard that there are other forms of vaping where e.g. cannabis oil is involved but that type of device works very differently and has nothing to do with “nicotine e-juice” vaping. (Edit: the NYT article is just conflating many separate phenomena under the umbrella term “vaping” which is very unfortunate). PS Ex smoker and ex vaper here (I went from smoking to vaping to quitting everything, couldn’t have done it without vaping), I‘m fairly technical since I was involved in DIY juice making and device “modding” so hit me if you have questions.
- posterboy 7y ago
  Yes you could have done it without vaping. Yes, you didn't do it, but that's no proof.
  - mastazi 7y ago
    When I look back at my personal story I don’t look for proof, I look at my past experiences and decide that something has value to me. If proof is what you’re looking for, scientific studies about the effects of vaping abound.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  It is a bit of a stretch to say there are no oils involved whatsoever. Glycerol/glycerin is almost always produced from triglycerides such as vegetable oil. (Edit: as the article states, the potential for left over oil from this process being present in the glycerol is one of the causes being explored) Additionally, I believe the flashpoint for glycerol is lower than most vegetable oils so your argument doesn't make sense.
kortex 7y ago
Search for "`chemical name` msds". You may need to look for the specific chemical name [1] rather than trade name. You should be able to find an occupational safety limit, lower exposure limit, or similarly worded section, which tells you how much (roughly) you can be safely (roughly) exposed to per unit time, usually 8 hour workday. Anything that isn't air doesn't belong in your lungs. Period. Some things are less bad than others. However diffusers are unlikely to increase the concentration to harmful levels for healthy individuals. As an asthmatic though, I can definitely feel it when lots of diffusers are running. [1] http://www.chemspider.com/ http://www.chemspider.com/

phillipseamore 7y ago

Vaping has much more history in Asia and Europe and seems to be without cases like this. The products from the cigarette industry aren't very prevalent in those contintents and also not vaping of THC and other such fluids. That plus the limited geography and timeframe seems to point only to contaimated juice.

userbinator 7y ago
Yes, a good investigation would be to analyse what all of these people vaped, and if they all came from a common source.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nannal 7y ago
  I'm 90% sure they just gave right up when they figured they'd vaped. what else do they have in common, that's what I'd like to know, maybe they'd eaten that day, or consumed water.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    I don't think that is how the CDC works...
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Which is exactly what's happening at this moment.
slovenlyrobot 7y ago
I've been vaping for about 10 years and would be happy to see tighter regulation of juices. Some of the stuff available is scary, and the purity is always up for question. There simply isn't any framework for this kind of thing yet. It's not all that surprising people are getting injured
- 7y ago

ptest1 7y ago

I believe these vaping cases are from using elicit, underground THC vaping products and not the usual e-cigarette / nicotine vaping we usually associate with the word “vaping.” There’s some details over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette/comments/cxov1b/no_one_needs_to_read_this_but_i_need_a_place_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/electronic_cigarette/comments/cxov1...

mastazi 7y ago
Yeah I wish the article gave more details instead of just spreading FUD
- sneak 7y ago
  Lethal FUD, as vaping standard PG+VG+nicotine mixtures without adulterants is orders of magnitude safer than smoking.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    On what basis do you know this?
    - eurasiantiger 7y ago
      People have been vaping for a decade. There is no epidemic of vape-related pulmonary issues anywhere else than in the US right now. Smoking kills over eight million people every year, 480,000 of them in the US alone. Even if the current epidemic turns out to be global, vaping is still several orders of magnitude less lethal.
      - shkkmo 7y ago
        Given how long smoking was deemed to be safe, what studies have you seen that show that vaping hasn't and won't turn out to have long term health effects on par with smoking? A decade is not a very long time to run the kind of large scale longitudinal studies that are needed to accurately gauge long term health effects. Making significant claims about the long term safety of e-cigs without this data seems quite irresponsible. Edit: lots of downvotes but still nobody actually willing to provide evidence for these ridiculous "several orders of magnitude safer" claims.

sandworm101 7y ago

I'm in the military. Some cadets visited our unit recently and I dropped in to say hi. One of them, a 13yo, asked about using a Juul while on duty. Our tour guide didn't know what a Juul was. Then a dozen kids showed him. Maybe 1/4 of the cadet group were carrying the devices.

oyebenny 7y ago
After seeing them, what was his or her reply?
callalex 7y ago
This has a HUGE sampling bias of only 13-year-olds that end up in a military recruitment program while still being the age of a child.
- sandworm101 7y ago
  Cadets /= "a military recruitment program". Cadets are more like the boy scouts, at least what scouts were a few generations ago. It is more like a summer camp where, if you are the best camper, you get to go on a helicopter ride on the last day of camp.
  - atlasunshrugged 7y ago
    Does cadets = JROTC?
    - sandworm101 7y ago
      Maybe in the US. There are other countries on this planet.

kappi 7y ago

I don't know how founders and investors of vaping startup sleep with blood in their hands. Outside this epidemic, there is real epidemic among school students making an entire future generation of adults addicted to nicotine.

wahern 7y ago
1) Vaping is far safer than smoking, and I applaud any efforts, profit-seeking or otherwise, that induce smokers to switch to vaping now. And though some claim that e-cigarettes didn't hasten the decline of cigarette smoking, and are possibly slowing it, if you look at the data you can't make that inference. In fact, if you look at the data it's just as possible that vaping was hastening the long-term decline. The problem is that of those who claim to both vape and smoke cigarettes, nobody is reporting the ratios--are they vaping in addition to smoking the same number of cigarettes, mostly vaping but smoking a few cigarettes each week, etc? 2) The source for the epidemic of vaping comes from the yearly youth drug survey. And if you look at the survey results, youths are experimenting with vaping in the same numbers as marijuana. And just like with marijuana, the activity is mostly only once or twice a week, not daily smokers. Where's the concern about the "epidemic" of pot smoking among youth? There's ample evidence that smoking pot is much more harmful for youth, both for their mental and physical development.
bubblesorting 7y ago
On a bed made of money :(
idDriven 7y ago
Would you tell people that are on SSRI antidepressants that they are addicted to antidepressant medication?

ng12 7y ago

This is a casualty of state governments dragging their feet when it comes to legalization. You can get very "legit looking" THC cartridges very easily where I live (New York). They're Chinese-made copies of legit dispensary brands which are then filled with whatever junk. It doesn't surprise me at all that some of them are tainted.

velox_io 7y ago
I find it interesting that the article is targeting vaping in general rather than buying tainted products. (My money is on THC extraction using Butane that is meant for fuel (that's heavily contaminated) rather than lab-grade/ pure.)
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  > I find it interesting that the article is targeting vaping in general rather than buying tainted products. Yea, I don't vape anything but I think it's a pretty fascinating public health issue and I'm very interested in potential developments in our understanding of its health impacts. I read the first couple of paragraphs and realized that the article has little to do with what its headline implies. I suppose I should've known better than to credulously read a headline from a clickbait rag like the NYT.
- dqpb 7y ago
  I find it interesting that this is news at all - Idiot intentionally inhales particulates into lungs. Experiences negative health effects.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Seems unlikely, though IANAChemist. Butane is a volatile (BP ~0 centigrade) short-chain hydrocarbon, and its isomers would likely (?) be similar. Contaminants of butane might be what? If they were longer chained they'd be less volatile but still disappear quickly. If they were long enough to hang around to mess up lungs then they'd probably not vapourise well in the first place so wouldn't make good solvents. Just a guess though.

ghostpepper 7y ago

> But vaping has its own problems: To become inhalable, nicotine or THC, the high-inducing chemical in marijuana, must be mixed with solvents that dissolve and deliver the drugs. This is not strictly true; there are vaporizers that take regular dried cannabis buds and deliver THC. No chemicals are involved.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

Maybe I'm showing my age but it brings back memories of Legionnaires Disease.

kerkeslager 7y ago

The actual number of cases isn't given, only a minimum: > Dr. Pirzada is one of the many physicians across the country treating patients — now totaling more than 215 — with mysterious and life-threatening vaping-related illnesses this summer. 215 is a much smaller number than I would have guessed based on that headline, and it's also an oddly-specific number to just say, "More than" with. This stinks of sensationalism. Shame on you, New York Times, you're better than this. Why does it matter? Vaping only has to be a tiny bit healthier than smoking and prevent a small percentage of people from smoking, to save "more than 215" lives. The research into the effects of vaping doesn't seem to be conclusive, so I don't know yet whether vaping is safer, or by how much. But when research does come to some concusions, I want public policy with regard to vaping to be written based on facts viewed in context, not sensationalized fearmongering.

TylerE 7y ago
Don't think it's a weird number. i would certainly hope they know _exactly_ how many cases have actually presented - plus there will always be some more that never see a doctor's office.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  If they know _exactly_ how many cases have presented, then they could have said _exactly_ how many cases have presented, instead of saying "more than 215". And this is the number of cases, it's the number of patients. You're not a patient until you see a doctor, so that doesn't include people who don't see a doctor. There are a lot of numbers that are more than 215, but with such a specific number, it makes me think that the number is something like 217, and they just said "more than 215" to sensationalize it. And to be clear, 215 cases in a nation the size of the US is not "becoming an epidemic".

aaron695 7y ago

This is obviously hysteria. Perhaps, in this case there is an underlying issue that is bigger than thought. But this shit shouldn't be rocket science. If there is a issue with vaping it will be across the world in an even distribution, also even over time. This also goes with contaminates! We can't suddenly be getting spikes from contaminates in states miles apart. At best, person Z is causing the issue, lives in state X and has a GF in state Y, this might cause a blip. But it won't be a scatter shot. If it spread on the internet, perhaps, but it's on the internet, it's findable. I'd guess the current scattershot is cause by hysteria mixed with hospitals incompetence not reporting valid info as they should. Why are people not horrified their hospitals can't figure this out? The open info possibly is almost enough to get a good idea, is it happening overseas? What's the underlying mechanism, or are we truly that stupid we don't understand how lungs work at all. Piece it all together. And stop calling it lung disease, I don't care if it's technically correct, this is not what it's called in common spoken English.

cannaceo 7y ago

As someone who has experience in this industry I can point to the cause. Biomass ("trim") was very easy to source leading up to CA recreational legalization in 2018. For those of you who don't know the majority of cannabis nationally comes from CA and OR. Legalization brought with it enforcement against unlicensed NorCal farms that drastically reduced supply. This was amplified by the massive overproduction of the 2017 market that had many farmers leave the market due to extremely low prices. This is evidenced by the shutdown of soil/grow supply warehouses throughout NorCal. By February 2019 the last of the October 2018 harvest had been processed to distillate. Many operators started reprocessing waste material. At the same time, distillate started to make it's way over from Mexico. There is a drought of product in the black market but wholesale buyers were reluctant to pay higher prices after becoming accustomed to the low prices of 2018. In the beginning unscrupulous sellers started diluting their product by 60%. Buyers eventually caught on to the charade and started paying attention to the reduced viscosity of the oil as an indicator of cutting agents. Sellers countered this by adding thickening agents. Now you have an illicit market with high demand, not enough supply, and customers that represent established black markets across the country that don't want to pay a risk premium for oil. The cutting agents themselves are expensive so people have started making their own. Now people are getting sick from the cutting agents.

shkkmo 7y ago
This comment was great, until the last sentence. What is your basis for that claim? Do you know of some particular cutting agent that causes these symptoms? Speculation should not be presented as fact. We don't know what is causing these cases but you have presented a reasonable hypothesis.
- cannaceo 7y ago
  None of these cutting agents are approved for human inhalation and no studies will be done. From an epidemiological perspective these cases are tightly clustered both temporally and location wise which really limits the possibilities. Common cutting agents in the licensed market are PEG200, PEG300, and MCT oil. None are those are proven safe from what I know. In the black market the initial cutting agent was PEG600. Then TrueTerpenes came out with Viscosity ( https://trueterpenes.com/products/diluent/viscosity-extract-liquifier/ https://trueterpenes.com/products/diluent/viscosity-extract-... ). Initially they said it was all terpenes (simple alcohols found in cannabis responsible for some effects and flavor) to sell it. It later came out that it was "mineral oil" but the reality is no one knows exactly what it is but it's a petroleum-based product of some kind. There was backlash against TrueTerpenes for this but selling mineral oil at $1500/liter (price point for cutting agents) is profitable. Some reports have described the symptoms as consistent with lipid pneumonia. Next FloraPlex released their thickening agent. Then HoneyCutt. I started hearing stories of people selling 0% THC epoxies to unsuspecting buyers as distillate starting a few months ago. Now there are people making their own thickening agents. Is it a theory? Yes. I'm normally scientifically conservative but I'd place a friendly wager on this one.

rgejman 7y ago

I remain cautiously pessimistic because there are two main possibilities: (1) there is one product (or a series of products manufactured/purified in the same way) that causes respiratory failure in many or all users, (2) all vaping products have a low level risk of causing respiratory failure. I don't think there is enough data to make a conclusion yet, but I am worried this will end up being a low-level persistent problem with vaping products—bootleg or not—for the rest of our lives. Maybe the culprit truly is dirty oil based extraction of THC... but if so, that will remains a problem for as long as there is no regulation of the official market as well as an operating black market. OTOH we may end up with a situation like we have in the world of muscle builder / hormone supplements where most people are fine but some users get really sick (e.g. deer hormones sold at regular stores causing severe kidney injury), but not enough of them get sick to get the CDC/FDA involved. I've seen those cases in the hospital and the patients are always confused as to how this could happen because they got the supplement from a vitamin store. With respect to some of the European posters below who have been using vape products for years: I would not be surprised if there were health consequences to those devices that had not been identified in Europe. The US has one of the best disease identifying-apparatuses in the world (the Centers for Disease Control) and a tradition of surveillance and reporting that is unparalleled. If a substance is harmful to health, it's got a better chance of being found here than anywhere else.

taurath 7y ago

This is all weed pens and concentrates right?

Forge36 7y ago
Local news said "89% report using products which contained THC" I've not seen it stated online

usrlocaletc 7y ago

Mass hysteria / moral panic perhaps? Isn't the greater, real threats are people are inhaling massive quantities of nicotine and propylene glycol, and not sufficiently cleaning their atomizers?

Redoubts 7y ago

I'd like to remind everyone of the trial of Tim Heidecker, which was a case similar to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWotb3gci0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWotb3gci0A

pram 7y ago
He was fully exonerated though!
- tabs_masterrace 7y ago
  common don't spoil the ending like this
dbtqgoat 7y ago
Holy fuck haha

mikkelam 7y ago

I vape dry herb, should i be worried?

AltmousGadfly 7y ago

We already know exactly what's causing this, and it has nothing to do with THC or vape juice (vegetable glycerin). These people are vaping grey market THC carts. Grey market being the operative word, because the process used to make wax relies on using butane and other heavy solvents to dissolve the plant while keeping the THC intact. These small, backyard producers are dumb as shit and don't know how to properly remove the solvents.