(AFP) - Health experts defended e-cigarettes at an anti-smoking conference in Abu Dhabi on Friday, dismissing concerns that it could promote teenage addiction to nicotine. Most of these experts, however, agreed that the use of e-cigarettes should be regulated because their effects are still too little known.
However, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Margaret Chan, on Wednesday gave her support to governments that ban or regulate the use of electronic cigarettes.
« No smoking is the norm and e-cigarettes will mislead this normal thought as they will incite smoking, especially young people“, She told reporters on the sidelines of the World Conference on Tobacco and Health, which is being held in the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
But for Jean-François Etter, professor at the University of Geneva, “ e-cigarettes, (lozenges of) nicotine and tobacco inhaler should not be over-regulated". It could " reduce the number of smokers who turn to these new products "for the benefit of" only large groups of tobacco companies"
The first e-cigarettes were produced in China in 2003 and have since become increasingly popular around the world.
Alan Blum, a general practitioner and director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society at the University of Alabama, generally recommends e-cigarettes to his patients who want to quit smoking, rather than " give them a drug that has side effects and doesn't work very well". But he deplores its use by children, or the fact that some use it with cannabis or marijuana.
Mr. Farsalinos, for his part, quoted an unpublished study according to which if 3% of smokers switch to e-cigarettes, some two million lives will be saved over the next twenty years"
According to the WHO, tobacco kills nearly six million people a year and if no action is taken quickly, it will be eight million by 2030.
Source : leparisien.fr/
