A group of researchers may have cooked the books to show that vapor exhaled from e-cigarettes is more dangerous than it actually is.

A paper published in the Current Environmental Health Reports found that “secondhand” exposure to exhaled e-cigarette vapor is toxic because it contains particulate matter, which can pose a risk to the respiratory system.

Anti-smoking advocates, doctors and the American Vaping Association claim the report is totally bogus. According to the critics, the study found essentially no difference between the amount of particulate matter in a house with active vaping and homes that were both totally vape and smoke-free.

The observational study found that the home containing tobacco smoke had levels of PM2.5 60 times greater than the homes with and without vaping. The results showed that the home with vaping measured 9.88 micrograms per cubic meter of air.

The two homes with no vaping or smoking at all recorded PM2.5 levels of 9.53 and 9.36. The house with tobacco measured PM2.5 of 572.52 per cubic meter.

Dr. Michael Siegel, Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, wrote on Tobacco Analysis:

The truth is that exposure to the e-cigarette aerosol is no more ‘toxic’ than baseline exposure in a completely smoke-free, vape-free home. In other words, in terms of fine particulate matter exposure, secondhand vaping appears to represent no risk.

Siegel added that “it has the appearance that because the results didn’t come out the way the authors wanted it to, they misreported the conclusion to conform with what was apparently their predetermined conclusions against e-cigarettes.

“This is a fine example of severe bias by anti-tobacco researchers in the reporting of scientific results about e-cigarettes.”

Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos, a cardiologist and researcher at Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center in Athens, agrees with Siegel, observing that the conclusion of the study runs counter to the actual data shown in the report.

“Indeed, the published figure which displays the PM2.5 [particulate matter] concentration in homes clearly showed that the levels in the vaper’s and the non-smoker’s home are virtually indistinguishable, besides some very small peaks at the time of taking e-cigarette puffs,” wrote Farsalinos

Farsalinos even went as far to label the study as a “classical and obvious example of misinterpretation of study findings.”

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