What are vapes and vaping?
While vaping has been around for over a decade, the rates for usage among youth have increased significantly in the last few years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of middle and high school students using e-cigarettes in the United States rose from 2.1 million in 2017 to 3.6 million in 2018—a difference of about 1.5 million youth.
So what is vaping? What do we know about vaping-related illness? How can you talk to your child about the dangers of vaping? Michael Colburn, MD, adolescent medicine specialist with University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, is here to help answer some of the questions you may have.
Vaping is a process of taking a solution and aerosolizing it to inhale it into the lungs through the use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) or another vaping device.
That solution can contain a lot of different things such as flavors as well as nicotine.
The device used to vape is called an electronic nicotine delivery system or an ENDS unit.
They might also be called e-cigarettes or electronic cigarettes. Some look a lot like traditional tobacco products – cigarettes or pipes. But others can be more disguised to look like pens or flash drives.
JUUL© and blu© are some brand names out there, and they are, in concept, the same thing.
Most JUUL© or blu© products are a structured unit that can’t be altered. A mod is a unit that can be modified to allow even more vaping liquid to be inhaled into the lungs.
Vape juice is the liquid put into the device that heats up and turns into the vapor. Vape juice can also be known as e-liquid.