How bad are e-cigarettes for your health? If used improperly, they can cause you to wind up in the hospital. Accidental exposure to the nicotine fluid in e-cigarette refills has caused a substantial rise in the calls to poison control centers, according to News Day.
Accidental exposure to the e-cigarette refills can cause a host of issues. The substance can trigger eye, skin and inhalation injuries. Yet this substance becomes more dangerous when children get a hold of the refills. Because of the different "flavors" that the e-cigarette refills come in, children can accidentally drink the substance. This can cause children to wind up in the hospital.
"When e-cigarettes first came out, the nicotine was contained in a cartridge," said Dan Jacobsen of the North Shore-LIJ Center for Tobacco Control in Great Neck in an interview with News Day. "Now, to make them cheaper and easier to use, they are refillable and because these refills have flavors, they entice children."
From Sept. 2010 to Feb. 2014, Poison centers reported 2,045 e-cigarette and 16,248 cigarette exposure calls, according to The Daily Mail. It's likely that the number of poisoning cases may be much higher since it's unlikely that all exposures were reported to poison centers.
"We sometimes forget that nicotine itself is a poison," said Ashley Webb, director of the Kentucky Regional Poison Control Center in Loisville, in an interview with The Washington Post. "It's such a highly concentrated substance that it's more likely to cause symptoms at a lower dose."
The Food and Drug Administration has announced its intentions to regulate e-cigarettes, but it's been slow to act. Currently, no regulations exist that require manufacturers to create liquid nicotine refills in child-resistant packaging, or even provide detailed warning labels.
The latest rise in poisonings from e-cigarettes reveals that new regulations need to be put into place for the safety of the public and children. By creating more child proof packaging, for example, manufacturers could potentially help reduce the number of poisonings due to accidental exposure.
