Being Open about COI

This little gem comes via (yet another) ridiculously pointless “study” into the ‘effects of vaping’ by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University. A study that, by the way, has taken two years and collaboration between faculty from VCU’s Biomedical Engineering and Biology departments.

So given money to churn out junk science natch. As noted in the article, the researchers aim is to “educate the public about the dangers of e-cigarettes” and as such are deliberately producing results that they can then take to legislators to shaft the industry.

Of course, so far there has been no formal publication in a journal yet (are you listening Tobacco Control Journal?), so once again we have science by press release.

A quick check of the “lead investigator” René Olivares-Navarrete, suggests quite clearly that he has little, if any, experience in this field of study and unsurprisingly, neither does his co-conspirator Amanda Dickinson. Yet, both are clearly claiming:

In other words, how vaping – and specifically nicotine natch – affects the mouth and face. Considering there haven’t been any significant reported instances of orofacial disorders related to vaping, especially in the last decade, it is a stretch of the imagination to suggest that there’ll be any.

Wait a sec. They state “orofacial disorders”, but are talking about vaping during pregnancy? Of course, that is when development is at its most vulnerable. So we’re looking at how vaping affects the unborn, which they claim (correctly) hasn’t been done, but there is enough evidence to produce some guidance on the subject.

This again? Those that don’t believe the crappy propaganda being pushed by the zealots are right. Vaping isn’t harmful, and any exposure of “carcinogenic compounds” is orders of magnitude lower than found in smoking. We have substantial evidence of that.

Yet more “we just don’t know” rubbish. We do know. We know more than enough. Science has advanced substantially since the early days of investigating any links (no matter how tenuous) to disease and smoking.

Good grief, the wibble is strong in this one! Vaping is not smoking. It is abundantly clear that these researchers have a deep ideological bias, along with a complete lack of knowledge on the subject. Par for the course in this area of research I guess. But then, the NIH wouldn’t dish out millions of tax payer cash otherwise.

Surprisingly, for a news article, there is much detail about the study itself – despite the paper not being published in a journal, or being peer-reviewed (which we know is a thoroughly broken system when it comes to tobacco control):

Once again, we have an animal study to “simulate” what could possibly happen in a human. Except for one tiny little problem. In a human, we don’t infuse the aerosol with saline. We directly inhale said aerosol into our lungs. There’s very little interaction with human saliva, ‘cos that’d cause us to cough all the time if we started inhaling our saliva.

So, taking a “standard” smoking machine, with a few modifications to mimic how a user would use a vapouriser. We’ve seen how that works out before. Amusingly, these researchers exposed frog embryos to the saline infused aerosol.

Here’s a tip, frogs are a freshwater species. They don’t fare at all well in salt-water conditions. They tend to get rather dehydrated, and the salt is more than a little toxic for them. You’d think that the researchers would know this right?

Of course not, they’ll blame diacetyl – which has been thoroughly debunked so many times. There isn’t even a known incidence of “popcorn lung” being found in a smoker.

Well yes, it is quite well-known that nicotine, can have these effects. But of course, most women won’t be exposing their unborn child to a saline-infused solution of aerosol. Nicotine exposure to a fetus happens through the blood stream (mostly), so the thing to look for is the blood-plasma levels, but these researchers didn’t bother to do that:

So it’s a case of generating as much hyperbole as possible then.

I think it’s a case of “when granted additional funding” ‘cos we know how the NIH likes to fund utter rubbish. It’s no wonder that there is a science line in addition to a date line.

See how it works yet?

(image credit Diego Cervo/Shutterstock.com)