World Health Day: The evidence for e-cigarettes

To mark World Health Day, we thought we would shed a little light on the current evidence backing e-cigarettes as the most popular and most effective stop-smoking aid .

• The Smoking Tool Kit Study published in 2019 found that in the past year, 28.6 percent of smokers have tried to stop, and in one month alone, there was a recorded 11.1 percent increase in the number of smokers making the switch to e-cigarettes.
• In December last year, Public Health England launched a campaign reinforcing the message that vaping is 95 percent less harmful than smoking. The authors concluded with the message that health care professionals should be suggesting this smoking-cessation aid more often.
• Quoted by both the NHS and Professor Peter Hajek of Queen Mary University of London, it was recently found that e-cigarettes were twice as effective as nicotine replacement products in helping smokers quit.
• Despite a third of smokers having never tried the devices, The Department for Health and Social Care estimates that between 16,000 and 22,000 people successfully quit smoking using e-cigarettes each year, and by equipping the public with more knowledge on the subject these numbers could increase significantly.

With 3.2 million vapers in the UK in 2018, and the number of those who have managed to quit smoking e-cigarettes standing at 3 million – the figures speak for themselves.