Electronic cigarettes, marketed as safer than regular cigarettes, deliver a cocktail of toxic chemicals including carcinogens into the lungs, new studies show. Using e-cigarettes may even make bacterial infections resistant to antibiotics, according to one study.

Engineers developed e-cigarettes several years ago to provide tobacco users a smoke-free source of nicotine. The devices heat up a liquid that a user inhales, or “vapes.” Because e-cigarettes burn nothing, they release no smoke.

“There’s no question that a puff on an e-cigarette is less toxic than a puff on a regular cigarette,” says Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. But few studies have looked at the toxicity of their vapors. As a result, scientists have been circumspect about describing e-cigarettes as safe.

For a May 13 review in Circulation, Glantz and his team pored over emerging data on what vapers are inhaling and found, he says, greater risk than scientists had thought. E-cigarettes deliver high levels of nanoparticles, the researchers found, which can trigger inflammation and have been linked to asthma, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes (SN: 7/18/09, p. 26). The levels “really raise concerns about heart disease and other chronic conditions where inflammation is involved,” he says.

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