The Mysterious Vaping Illness That?s ?Becoming an Epidemic?

On Aug. 6, Dr. Harris was working in a Salt Lake City-area hospital — she declined to provide more detail in order to protect patient privacy rights — when she was called to the intensive care unit to consult on a patient with the severe lung ailment.The patient was in his 20s and a heavy e-cigarette user who also vaped THC.She later consulted with two dozen hospitals around the state on patients with difficult pulmonary or critical care issues. Maybe there’s some sort of accelerant effect causing inflammation in the lung caused by the THC oil.” She added that her interviews with patients suggested they were getting the marijuana liquid from friends in states with legal supplies of the drug, like California and Colorado.Some patients are suffering from another condition known as lipoid pneumonia, doctors said. Liquid nicotine and THC, sometimes sold in cartridges for use in vaping devices, can each contain oils that may be safe to swallow but can damage the lung when vaporized into a mix of unknown chemicals.While e-cigarettes have been presumed less harmful over the long run than cigarettes, the ultimate impact from years of vaping is simply not yet known. Mr. Eissenberg, director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco Products at Virginia Commonwealth University, said seven cases of similar lung injuries from e-cigarette vaping had been reported in previous years. “If there is some incomplete process, there can be oil left in the vegetable glycerin when that person is using it, and inhaling oil and getting oil into your lungs is what is causing some of the lung injuries we see.”“Basically what the F.D.A. should be doing is testing every one of these liquids to see if they have any oil at all and making a regulation that would ban oil in any of these products, whether it is a THC product or a nicotine product,” said Mr. Eissenberg, who is researching vaping with a grant from the agency. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a part of the National Institutes of Health, said she was surprised at the severity of the lung disease involved in this summer’s cases, but not by the possibility that vaping products were causing such illnesses.“There is no oversight,” Dr. Volkow said.