A survey of 35,000 American teenagers shows 19.6% of high school students and 4.7% of college students vape regularly. Worrying figures, which show that the e-cigarette constitutes a public health challenge, especially as the landscape of vaping devices is changing.
- This new national survey on youth smoking shows that the number of young people vaping regularly is down slightly
- But young vapers increasingly favor cartridge e-cigarettes like Juul, with a high nicotine content.
Among young Americans, the electronic cigarette is still on the rise. Charmed by advertising and attracted by the range of flavors available on the market, more and more teenagers are vaping, thanks in particular to pod devices such as those sold by the Juul brand. Created in 2015, the latter held 68% of the American e-cigarette market in 2018 – certainly more today.
This is demonstrated by the new National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS). Published in the New England Journal of Medicineit sheds light on the challenges posed by electronic cigarettes in terms of public health.
A strong popularity of cartridge electronic cigarettes
The NYTS survey is a school-based cross-sectional electronic survey conducted at the county, school, and classroom levels to generate a nationally representative sample of middle school (grades 6-8) and high school ( grades 9-12) from the United States. The data was collected in two stages: first between February and May 2019 from 19,018 respondents, then between January and March 2020 from 14,531 respondents.
The figures show that 19.6% of high school students (3.02 million) and 4.7% of middle school students (550,000) used an e-cigarette in the previous 30 days in 2020, 1.8 million less than in 2019.
If young people vaped less than in 2019, the survey reveals the rise of new devices with pods or pre-filled cartridges and with high levels of nicotine, such as Juul. 3% of middle school students tested these electronic pod cigarettes in 2019, and 15.2% in 2020.
This figure is also on the rise among high school students: 2.4% reported disposable e-cigarettes in 2019, compared to 26.4% in 2020, which corresponds to 790,000 students. Pre-filled pods or cartridges also remained the most used type of device in 2020: 220,000 middle school students and 1.45 million high school students tested them.
For the researchers, the strong growth in the use of disposable devices among young Americans must be at the heart of new public health campaigns warning against vaping. In particular, they cite the example of the Food and Drug Administration, which prioritized enforcement against certain unauthorized flavored cartridge e-cigarettes in January 2020. The FDA also sent in July 2020 warning letters to 10 companies to stop selling or distributing flavored disposable e-cigarettes and e-liquids that appeal to young people.
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