According to research published in April, by the US Center for Disease Control, in the past year, the American students began to smoke fewer tobacco cigarettes, but in three times more – e-cigarettes. In general, the number of smokers among US high school students has increased from 22.9% to 24.6%.
On Thursday, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a study, according to which students of middle and high school in the last year, three times more often began to use electronic cigarettes than tobacco cigarettes. In 2013, the electronic cigarette used only 4.5% of high school students, in 2014 this number rose to 13.4% – from 660 thousand, to more than 2 million people. Among middle school students the number of smoking electronic cigarettes increased from 1.1% to 3.9% (from 120 thousands to 440 thousands).
At the same time, the number of students smoking regular cigarettes declined from 12.7% to 9.2% – this is the most significant decrease for the year over the last decade. In total, the number of smokers among high school students increased from 22.9% to 24.6% among middle school students, this figure amounted 7.7%. CDC Director Tom Frieden said, “We want parents to know that nicotine is harmful to children of all ages, regardless of whether they smoke electronic cigarette, hookah, cigarettes or cigars.”
According to published in November 2014, the annual CDC report, the number of smokers in the United States has dropped to 17.8% of the total population and made up 42.1 million people. It was the lowest figure since 1995, when the organization began to conduct such research.
According to scientists, it has conducted several studies that prove that electronic cigarettes are less harmful than tobacco. However, the WHO is not in a hurry to recognize the benefits of electronic cigarettes.
A scientifically proven fact is that electronic cigarettes are less harmful to human health. However, there are a lot of evidence which suggest that e-cigarettes can cause the same harm to the human health, as regular cigarettes. After all, in most cases, e-cigarettes also contains nicotine, which is highly addictive.