FDA Poisons the Promise of E-Cigarettes With Its Latest No-Context Report

 

The FDA Center for Tobacco Products on June 23 published a report titled, “E-Cigarette–Associated Cases Reported to Poison Centers.”  Examining data for the most recent full year, they found that the total (n=7,043) represented “a further increase in the number of e-cigarette exposure cases, particularly among children aged <5 years” (6,074 cases or 88% of the total).

The document wrongly implies the existence of a poisoning nightmare: “Health care providers; the public health community; e-cigarette manufacturers, distributors, sellers, and marketers; and the public should be aware that e-cigarettes have the potential to cause poisoning exposure and are a continuing public health concern.” 

Furthering its effort to eliminate e-cigarettes and vaping products, the agency published its data with no context, and amplified it with a sky-is-falling press release (here).  Following is that missing context with full-year numbers from the most recent National Poison Data System annual report.

In 2021, there were 2,080,917 cases of human exposure reported to poison centers.  The five substances most frequently involved were analgesics (283,000), household cleaning products (189,000), cosmetics/personal care products (148,000), antidepressants (142,000) and sedatives/hypnotics/antipsychotics (116,000).  With the exception of cleaning products, those exposures total 689,000 cases, and the FDA has direct regulatory authority over all of them.

The NPDS report also traces deaths, and for e-cigarettes/vaping products there was one death.  For the other three FDA-regulated categories there were 804 deaths (720 for analgesics, 10 for cosmetics, 44 for antidepressants and 30 for sedatives). 

Tobacco products were involved in 13,142 cases, or just 0.63% of all poisonings, and e-cigarettes’ share of the total was 0.26%.   

Now let’s look at children age 5 years and under. (The FDA report defines this category as “under 5 years,” whereas the poison reports use “5 years and under;” I’ll use the latter.).  There were a total of 883,822 exposures, and cosmetics/personal care products took 1^st place (96,000), followed by cleaners (94,000), analgesics (72,000), dietary supplements/herbals/homeopathic (62,000) and foreign bodies/toys/miscellaneous (57,000).  Compared with poisonings at all ages, tobacco products had a slightly larger share of children’s exposures (n=10,249), at 1.17%; the e-cigarettes share was 0.47%. 

The FDA report furthers the agency’s misinformation campaign casting vaping as a public health crisis.