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Medicine United States Science

Vaping Illnesses Linked To Vitamin E Acetate, CDC Says (cnn.com) 51

Posted by BeauHD from the connecting-the-dots dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Vitamin E acetate, an ingredient added to THC-based products, has been identified as a "very strong culprit" in the vaping-related lung injuries (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) that have sickened 2,051 people and killed more than three dozen, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday. But the agency left open the possibility that other chemicals or toxins could also be causing the severe respiratory ailments. The report is based on finding the vitamin compound in fluid samples taken from the lungs of 29 patients who had the lung disease. "For the first time, we have detected a potential toxin of concern, vitamin E acetate, from biological samples from patients," with lung damage linked to vaping, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the C.D.C., said at a news briefing. The samples, she said, "provided evidence of vitamin E acetate at the primary site of injury in the lungs."

Samples taken from the patients were also tested for plant oils, petroleum distillates like mineral oil and other potentially harmful substances, which were "notably not detected," the C.D.C. said. The findings are being published in Friday's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. About 70 percent of the patients are male, 79 percent are younger than 35 and 86 percent say that they have vaped THC. Many of the products used by those who became ill were illicitly obtained, public health experts have said, by patients who bought them from friends or on the street. Vaping oils typically include other additives, solvents and flavor enhancers. Vitamin E acetate is sometimes added to dilute the THC to increase profits or as a thickening agent.
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Vaping Illnesses Linked To Vitamin E Acetate, CDC Says More

Vaping Illnesses Linked To Vitamin E Acetate, CDC Says

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  • 1,300 people die every day from smoking in just the US. Public Health England insists vaping is 95% safer [bmj.com] and it's looking more and more like unregulated street carts for THC vaping were made with a well known lung irritant out of ignorance and has caused the vast majority of the problem and deaths. This media knee jerk reaction to ban something completely unrelated to the problem smacks of ulterior motives. If they were serious about banning harmful flavors they should have started with menthol, not made

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday November 08, 2019 @08:54PM (#59396446)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Sure just as they get a hold of flavored liquor

        Whoah there cowboy! Flavored alcohol is beloved by the rich old people making the laws round' these parts. A few kids dead of alcohol poisoning is a perfectly natural part of growing up. Now back to the vaping crisis...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jiriw ( 444695 )

        Comment do undo accidental incorrect moderation. Please someone else add a +1 insightful to parent for me ;)

    • Everyone dies sooner or later. More people die per day from not smoking than die from smoking. Every single one of them died from being born. If they had not been born, then they would not become dead. They also drank water.

  • Curios if this ingredient is used by legitimate e-liquid producers or only found in thc containing street products. My guess is that it is the later and the %30 of the stick that said they didn't use thc products are lying

    • Its made by licensed dispensaries. Only dumbass hippies would think vitamin-e was better for you than PEG400, which is the fda approved chemical for thinning bho. You can buy peg400 online lots of places. Its not even that expensive. Vit-e was ignorant people thinking they were in tune with mother earth. Been to Bolder? That prettymuch describes the whole damn town. Most street sold product is just people making road trips to Colorado.

    • Curios if this ingredient is used by legitimate e-liquid producers

      Curios? An unusual or intriguing object? How curious....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Izuzan ( 2620111 )

      Its not used by legitimate businesses. Only used by Blackmarket Pot pod manufacturers. The E liquid industry only uses propylene glycol, and Vegetable Glycerin.

  • Honey Cut (Score:5, Informative)

    by shplopt ( 5409448 ) on Friday November 08, 2019 @09:22PM (#59396502)
    Apparently this can be traced to a specific thickening additive that was sold as Honey Cut [leafly.com].

  • So, as we all knew all along, like cocaine the problem isn't what you're buying, but what they're cutting it with.

    Street drugs are almost all much safer than most prescription drugs. It's the black market, created through racist drug laws and aggressive taxation, that is killing people.

    When the drug war finally ends, it would be nice if we threw everyone in the DEA in prison as a replacement.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      The DEA are victims here too! Heavily armed, property-seizing victims! The real culprit here is the Nixon administration and the administrations since then that have continued to push these laws forward. Sadly you can't throw ol' Tricky Dick himself in prison, since he's dead. Really missed our chance there, and we really should have when we had our chance. A bunch of his friends and all the usual suspects from the 80s are still running around, though, and that lot should definitely be put in a cage with an

  • If people were more familiar with Natural Philosophy, they'd know vaping, like smoking, is potentially very risky and they'd wait a few years to see what it results in.
    The lungs are made for breathing air, not chemical cocktails.

  • ...is finally covering this correctly. We've gone months (and yes, the CDC publicly stated a while back that they suspected Vitamin E acetate could be the culprit) with the main stream media reporting this as though ALL vaping was suspect, that there was no known cause, and that everyone should stop vaping immediately. We knew early on what the suspected culprit was, we knew that it was almost entirely limited to THC vapes, we knew that it was almost entirely limited to street-made THC vapes, we knew WHY the Vitamin E acetate was being used in those vapes, and no one seemed all that interested in why this was a sudden thing despite vaping being at least somewhat popular for close to a decade. This entire story has had some of the worst reporting on any topic I've ever seen in my life. And given the state of journalism these days, that's saying a lot.

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