The most irresponsible e-cig reporting I have ever seen.

Well, it appears that the morons are back in town.

Smoking can be very bad for you, all the newspapers agree on that - but Susannah Butter, writing in the Mail on Sunday says that there is one thing that is "more harmful" than smoking, you guessed it - electronic cigarettes !

The article was titled "E-cigarettes 'can cause more harm than smoking' experts say"

WHAT ! - how can inhaling a vapour be "more harmful" than a smoke that contains tar and numerous toxic chemicals and that has been linked to a range of serious diseases (some of them fatal) ?

According to Susannah Butter, "experts" say it is "more harmful" than smoking.

NO THEY DON'T - Experts agree that an electronic cigarette is about 99% less dangerous than smoking.

So lets have a look at how Susannah Butter tries to justify this ludicrous claim.

She writes that :
"propylene glycol in e-cigarettes can be harmful" - this is a substance that has been extensively tested for at least the last 40 years and is regarded as "safe", it is even used in asthma inhalers, for example, so what makes her think that it could be harmful ?

She goes on to explain:
According to a doctor in Germany, it can cause "acute respiratory irritation" - the word 'acute' sounds serious, but in a medical context it is used as the opposite of 'chronic' - meaning short-term rather than long-term ongoing.

So you might get a "sore throat" - indeed it is already known that a small number of e-cig users (some people say about 3%) do get a dry throat when they use PG liquid - these people use liquid that does not contain PG, and opt for a VG liquid instead.

The approved and safe Nicorette Quickmist product also uses Propylene Glycol to deliver nicotine and this isn't "more harmful" than smoking - in fact nobody, apart from a complete moron or perhaps Susannah Butter, would consider a bit of a sore throat that doesn't last long to be "more harmful" than CANCER !

As we read down the article, we still haven't seen any evidence of an "expert" yet alone "experts" plural, who say that e-cigs are more harmful than smoking, so keep reading, there must be more to come ...

There isn't

She goes on to quote the (now widely discredited) FDA tests that were carried out in 2009 that found traces of nitrosamine in e-cigs but completely fails to mention that the levels found were so low that they could not even be quantified and were also the same tiny levels that are also found in Nicotine Gum and Patches - so low as to have NO EFFECT ON HUMAN HEALTH.

As an aside - any e-cig user will be able to confirm that the e-cigs on the market now are worlds apart from the earlier models that were around in 2009, 4 years ago.

This newspaper article was the most lazy, ill thought out, badly researched pile of bullcrap that I have ever read about electronic cigarettes.