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Americans should not smoke electronic cigarettes, warned the Centers for Disease Control, while they were investigating how hundreds of people got sick and at least three people died after using them.
"While this investigation is ongoing, people should not use electronic cigarette products," said Dana Meaney-Delman of the CDC in an appeal Friday. This general recommendation is that there is a "variety of products" related to e-cigarettes, some containing THC or tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive component of marijuana, and others containing nicotine, she declared.
Nearly 450 people, including 215 officially reported CDC cases, in 33 states reported possible lung disease after using electronic cigarette devices, liquids, refill capsules and cartridges. Symptoms of this lung disease include shortness of breath, fatigue, fever and nausea or vomiting. Investigators must eliminate other causes of illness, apart from the use of the electronic cigarette, said Meaney-Delman. She is the incident manager who oversees efforts to track, understand and respond to this lung disease for the CDC.
The medical community is collecting more and more information to understand why people get sick and die, and "no definitive cause has been established," said Meaney-Delman.
Many chemicals and additives are present in electronic cigarettes, according to the call managers. They do not know what chemicals, or combinations of chemicals, could cause disease and death.
The results are preliminary, said Jennifer Layden, Chief Medical Officer and State Epidemiologist of the Illinois Department of Public Health, where one of the confirmed deaths occurred. She added that an increase in cases had started to appear in May and June compared to the previous year, suggesting that something new was happening. In Illinois, X-rays revealed abnormalities in patients' lungs, and almost all patients were hospitalized, Layden said.
It is premature to know what is causing these diseases, said Meaney-Delman, and that's why public health officials from the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and local and regional health departments "are working 24 hours a day on 24 "to understand what is happening.
So far, the authorities have collected more than 120 samples and researchers at FDA laboratories are analyzing them for a wide range of chemicals, including nicotine, THC, opioids, poisons and toxins. said Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products. . He said that "no compound" had been linked to all these diseases.
"We are at a critical stage of fact-gathering," said Zeller.
The CDC officials released Friday criteria to help doctors identify cases of lung disease related to the use of the electronic cigarette. Patients who used e-cigarettes in the last 90 days had abnormal chest X-rays but no evidence of infection and no medical records of possible diagnoses could be considered confirmed cases. according to the latest CDC guidelines. Some patients reported that symptoms developed after a few days, while others said they noticed symptoms several weeks later, the CDC said.
According to 2016 data published in Annals of Internal Medicine, it is estimated that 10.8 million adults at least use e-cigarette products in the United States. Of these, 15% said they never smoked cigarettes.
According to a 2018 study by the Department of Health and Social Services, e-cigarettes are the most common form of smoking among American teens.
According to the National Institute for Combating Drug Abuse, published in 2018, in its Monitoring the Future survey, in recent years, 37% of respondents said they had emancipated in the last year, compared to 28 % about. who said that they had a year earlier.
The FDA encourages users to report cases of illness that may be related to this disease to the FDA's Safety Reporting Portal, at www.safetyreporting.hhs.gov.
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