Teens lead the way on fight against vaping; pig lung demonstration

For the last 12 years, Northern Westchester Hospital has relied on a council of about 50 students to decide on topics for health-related education programming the hospital does in local schools.

This spring, the council — made up of students from Chappaqua, Yorktown, Byram Hills, North Salem, Bedford, Katonah-Lewisboro, Somers and Pleasantville school districts — had decided to focus on healthy relationships, but at the last minute switched course to something they deemed far more pressing: vaping.

“I first became aware of it last spring and it was just kind of like, oh I know some people who do it,” said Brielle Furci, a Yorktown High School senior and three-year member of the hospital’s student council. “But by the middle of the summer, end of the summer it was like everyone’s doing it anywhere you go.”

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Amy Rosenfeld, the youth program coordinator and a community health educator at the hospital, said the teens brought this to the attention of the adults and have helped shape what information makes it into the school presentations.

“The students are our best tools in the toolkit, they’re invaluable, their contribution is just immeasurable,” Rosenfeld said, adding that because of them, “we’re always revising our lesson plans and keeping things fresh and making sure it’s relatable.”

Margaret Ribaudo, a registered nurse who works with Northern Westchester Hospital to develop and present its education programs in schools, has also noticed the prevalence of vapes, or e-cigarettes, when she surveys classrooms she visits.

On a recent day in a Yorktown High School health class of about 20 ninth- and 10th-graders, Ribaudo asked them to raise their hands if they knew anyone their age who smoked traditional cigarettes.

A few hands went up.

But when she asked the same question about vaping, nearly every hand was raised.

“It’s taking off and it doesn’t mean that each one of those kids are doing it, but they’re all aware of people who are doing it," Ribaudo said. "It’s very commonplace to these kids."

All of these informal observations confirm the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) findings in a report published last June about youth and vaping.

E-cigarette use among high schoolers increased to 11.3 percent of students surveyed in 2016, up from 1.5 percent in 2011, according to the CDC report. Meanwhile, it said traditional cigarette use among high school students dropped to 8 percent from 15 percent during the same time period.

“It kind of has hit Westchester, and really the rest of the United States, by storm,” said Dr. Richard Stumacher, chief of Northern Westchester Hospital’s Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care and whose background includes smoking prevention and cessation.

In order to avoid a generation of kids getting addicted to vaping, Stumacher said, “knowledge is power, and the parents as well as the kids have to really know the truth of what’s going on. What makes it difficult is the information isn’t as black and white as smoking.”

Many vaping companies marketed the products originally as a strategy to quit traditional smoking, and for some it has helped, Stumacher said, but the message to teens was that it’s a safe alternative to cigarettes. In fact, e-cigarettes contain many of the same, often addictive and unhealthy, ingredients that cigarettes do.

While it’s still unclear what the long-term effects of vaping will be, Stumacher said he expects there to be a “tsunami of disease that’s going to hit our shores” if teens become addicted to e-cigarettes.

Ribaudo tries to pack all of this information and more into her hour-long classroom presentations, but the part that usually grabs the teens’ attention is a demonstration using pig lungs.

Dangling from a PVC pipe, one set of lungs is pink and when filled with air from a pump appear strong and healthy. The other set of lungs, which has been soaked in formaldehyde to simulate those of a smoker’s, are black and immediately deflate after pumped with air.

“You can see them start paying more attention and you can feel connected a little bit and they can see like it’s not just a harmless thing,” Ribaudo said. “I always tell them, if it’s a fad, it'd be gone by now, if it’s not addictive, it’d be gone, but unfortunately it’s hanging around.”

Furci hopes the awareness helps her peers understand the risks involved with vaping.

“You might not think there’s any proof that it’s harming your body … but that’s not a risk, at that age, that you should be making,” she said. “It’s really not good for you. That’s the bottom line.”