CDC Hypes ‘Dramatic Increase’ in Nicotine-Guzzling Children

Last week I
faulted The New York Times for hyping the threat
that e-cigarette fluid poses to children, a threat that pales in
comparison with those posed by many common household products.
Business reporter Matt Richtel warned that  “reports of
accidental poisonings, notably among children, are
soaring,” citing a “300 percent” rise between 2012 and 2013.
Today the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outdoes
Richtel, highlighting a “dramatic
increase” of 21,400 percent:

The number of calls to poison centers involving e-cigarette
liquids containing nicotine rose from one per month in September
2010 to 215 per month in February 2014…

More than half (51.1 percent) of the calls to poison centers due
to e-cigarettes involved young children 5 years and under, and
about 42 percent of the poison calls involved people age 20 and
older….

“This report raises another red flag about e-cigarettes—the
liquid nicotine used in e-cigarettes can be hazardous,” said CDC
Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “Use of these products is
skyrocketing and these poisonings will continue. E-cigarette
liquids as currently sold are a threat to small children because
they are not required to be childproof, and they come in candy and
fruit flavors that are appealing to children.”

As the reference to “another red flag” makes clear, Frieden is
not alerting us to an emerging threat so much as seeking to sully a
product he
dislikes for reasons that have
very little to do with public health. He relies on the same
trick as Richtel: When you start with a small number, increases
that are small in absolute terms look huge in percentage terms. It
is hardly surprising that a new, increasingly popular product that
is potentially hazardous to children would generate scary-looking
trends like these. But the total number of calls to poison control
centers related to e-cigarettes during the 42-month period covered
by the CDC
study was 2,405, or 57 per month. Poisoning reports
involving e-cigarette fluid are still a tiny fraction of
poisoning reports involving products the CDC is not
warning us about, such as analgesics, cosmetics, cleaning fluids,
anthistamines, pesticides, vitamins, and plants, all of which
generate thousands of calls to poison control centers each month.
In all these cases, the solution to preventing the poisoning of
little children is the same: keep little children away from
poison. 

When it comes to adults, caution in handling e-cigarette fluid,
which can be absorbed through the skin or eyes, seems appropriate,
although not always. According to the Times, the only
fatality caused by e-cigarette fluid so far was a suicide by a man
who injected it.