VCU researchers aim to educate the public about the dangers of e-cigarettes and produce results that would compel tighter government regulation.

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.

The study is one in a series of seven projects by research universities across the United States that look into the potential health impacts of e-cigarettes on parts of the head, face and oral cavity. Each study is funded with part of a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Regular readers will of course remember fondly that the EU held another “public consultation” recently, with the closing date of last month. This so-called public consultation was all about the taxation of manufactured tobacco products. Of course, being the EU and with the shiny new Tobacco Products Directive it just had to include the humble e-cigarette, despite (of course) neither the devices themselves, nor the liquid refills containing any actual manufactured tobacco at all - natch.

This is one of those topics that you just know. One of those that you yourself understand, but find it somewhat tricky to put into some semblance of coherent speech. We all, to varying degrees, know what pleasure is. We all know what we enjoy, and we can all express; to an extent, why we enjoy something.

This is also one of those posts that’s taken far too long to write.

One of the many reasons I have a blog is so that I can spout, mostly nonsense, into the ether my thoughts on a particular topic that piques my interest. It just so happens that this blog has a specific focus. Most of the posts on these pages cover the various bits of “science” - mostly bad science - that grab sensationalist headlines, that do nothing more than to confuse a highly nuanced subject. Most of the time I am fairly factual, though quite often I will, quite frankly, take the piss.

You may have noticed that I’ve been talking about Snus a bit recently. It appears that I’m not the only one. Now, if you do a search on Aunty Beeb for mention of Snus, you won’t find very much from the last twelve months. In fact before the most recent (junk) article, the last time Aunty Beeb mentions Snus in an article dates back to May 2015 when there was quite a bit of a to do about a certain EU official and a teeny bit of bribery.

There’s a new study doing the rounds at the moment. Well, I say “study” but it isn’t really. It’s yet another survey, with participants selected from eight southeastern Connecticut high schools from spring 2015. “This study is the first systematic evaluation of the use of dripping among teens,” says the lead author Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.

That does beg the first question, why is a professor of psychiatry even looking at e-cigs? I suspect I already know the answer, as do most of my regular readers.

It is well-known that within the UK, each of the devolved areas have completely different priorities when it comes to “running” their little piece of the country. Wales tried, and spectacularly failed last year to bring in a new “Public Health (Wales) Bill” which would, in effect have severe negative consequences for Welsh vapers. That Bill, the demented offspring of one Mark Drakeford, was defeated at the final hurdle, not by the weight of evidence as it should have been long before it got to the final vote, but by the “cheap date” comment.

Every once in a while a media article happens to come to my attention that makes me fall over in utter disbelief. Not simply due to the complete lack of understanding of the subject matter, but the complete disingenuity that the author takes to make as many bonkers points as possible.

It may be early in 2017, but this one is a strong contender for worst article of the year.

It must be something about this time of year for all the idiotic anti-vaping, anti-nicotine or anti-anything, to crawl out from under whatever rock they’ve been hiding under and spout a tranche of utter bullshit before scuttling back to their safe space, complete with a shiny new grant to cook up more bullshit.

Today saw the on-line release of three, well two, actually - one of them was an opinion piece - papers in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. It seems that AAP are ever so friendly with a certain rotund “professor” at UCSF, as one of these papers is his.

The European Union doesn’t have much love for tobacco at all, in fact it does everything it can to make life as miserable as possible for those they think are daft enough to smoke. Not content with pushing up prices on all forms of tobacco in a vain effort to get people to quit, the EU has undertaken a massive regulatory campaign to make it impossible or next to impossible for reduced risk products to be made available. Electronic cigarettes are only the latest in the crusade against all forms of “tobacco” use; despite of course the fact that e-cigarettes don’t actually contain tobacco, but they do mimic the act of smoking (part of the reason for the success for many users).