No smoke, plenty of fire fuels e-cigarettes

EGO CE4-Electronic cigarettes are the future, they argue. Cheaper, cleaner and cooler than smoking, "vaping" - using a vaporiser to inhale nicotine infused with exotic flavours ranging from pina colada to bubblegum - will spell the end of tobacco."After I first tried this, I left half a cigarette in the ashtray and never went back," says Zoltan Kore, who co-runs the newly opened London e-cigarette shop "Smoke No Smoke".

"I'm not a smoker now, I'm a vaper," says business partner Gabor Kovacs. "The awful morning coughing fits have gone, and the waking up in the night struggling to breathe has gone, too."

Such stories - and hopes of persuading the rest of the world's billion smokers to stub out their tar and toxin-loaded cigarettes, cutting a catalogue of chronic disease risks as they do - are tantalising for public health experts.All the top tobacco companies are now placing bets on ego t electronic cigarette, which some analysts predict may outsell conventional cigarettes in 10 years, raising the counter-intuitive prospect that Big Tobacco could actually help people quit smoking.

Celebrities like Bruno Mars and Courtney Love are also endorsing them, a further inducement to makers of iconic cigarette brands like Marlboro and Camel to invest.Yet e-cigarettes are far from universally accepted as a public health tool; regulators are agonising over whether to restrict them as "gateway" products to nicotine addiction and tobacco smoking, or embrace them as treatments for would-be quitters.

A big issue is the lack of long-term scientific evidence to support the safety and effectiveness of e-cigarettes, prompting critics like the British Medical Association (BMA) to warn of the dangers of their unregulated use. "These devices may also undermine efforts to prevent or stop smoking by making cigarette use seem normal in public and at work," argues the BMA, which has called for vaping to be banned in public places in Britain, just as smoking is.desSDds34

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is equally wary, saying that until ego-t battery have been endorsed as safe and effective by national regulators, "consumers should be strongly advised not to use any of these products".Supporters of e-cigarettes scoff at suggestions they are a hazard or could be a slippery slope for previously addiction-free young people to get hooked on nicotine.

There is, they argue, no evidence of any harm from nicotine consumption and it would be crazy to impose tougher restrictions on e-smokes than on toxic "death sticks" that are freely available to buy on almost every street corner worldwide.As Adrian Everett, chief executive of Britain's leading e-cigarette company E-Lites put it in a comment to Reuters: "Comparing electronic cigarettes to tobacco is like comparing playing football to juggling live hand grenades."

His work, some of which has had some funding from makers of electronic cigarette battery, has found no adverse effects on heart function, nor any notable cancer risks to cells in the lungs.Other research, however, suggests "vaping" may reduce lung capacity, and the German Cancer Research Center said last month it was concerned e-cigarette liquids contained ingredients that can irritate the airways, while poor quality products could contain carcinogens.