Professor Andrew Bush, a consultant paediatric chest physician at the Royal Brompton Hospital, in London, described vapes as being more dangerous for teenagers than cigarettes:

“If a teenager starts smoking cigarettes, probably the worst that’s going to happen to them is they’re going to be sick and throw up behind the bike shed,” he says. “The acute use of e-cigarettes can put them in hospital.”

Adding on to this, Dr Gareth Nye, a lecturer in physiology and researcher at Chester Medical School, says that one of the dangers that vapes pose to anyone, from children to adults, is that the chemicals within them can initiate a powerful autoimmune reaction within the lungs, causing damage over time:

“Whenever we put something into our body that the immune system doesn’t recognise, it aims to remove it from the body for our own protection,” he says. “In the process of removing foreign bodies, our immune system damages healthy cells, which over time leads to a loss of that tissue. This occurs with all vaping products, as with conventional cigarettes.”

The easy accessibility of disposable vapes still remains extremely prevalent despite some groups of people calling for vapes to be banned and the marketing of them to children to stop.

According to the latest statistics from the Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) group, nearly 21% of UK children aged 11-17 have tried vaping, up from 14% in 2020:

“If you think about the way some teens are using them, they’re just hitting them all day long, sometimes waking up in the night and vaping,” says Sally Huey, assistant professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC. “It can end up being equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes’ worth of nicotine a day.”

Since 2019, medical experts have become increasingly worried in the wake of widespread reports from the US of children becoming “nic-sick” through vaping-induced nicotine overdoses.

While some argue that vapes are harmless because they mostly contain water vapour – a combination of water, flavourings and nicotine tends to make up about 10-18% of the e-juice within vapes – when the e-liquid is heated during the process of powering the vape, toxic chemicals can be formed.

This is even before you consider the risk of inhaling vapes spiked with other substances. This may be your sign to get yourself, or your child off the vape.