It’s a critical time to talk about lungs.
While we are still having the conversation about smoking harm, 30 years of ongoing public health campaigns have made enormous inroads into smoking cessation rates. However, now vaping is catching the attention of doctors, public health experts, law enforcers and policy makers and causing great worry.
It is no longer a sneaky fag behind the school shed, vaping has become all-pervasive in schools, workplaces and in entertainment precincts, and like tobacco, it has become big business. Simply reference the WA Health Department’s first (an only) seizure of illegal vapes.
While it has been the first in a months-long campaign, it was a doozy – 15 tonnes of vapes were seized from a warehouse in Perth’s north-east in August, estimated to be worth $10 million. This alone should ring warning bells for politicians and law enforcers.
Doctors are warning that e-cigarette and vaping-associated lung injury (EVALI) is a real threat now.
As for the health industry, the notion that something which smells like Fruit Tingles can’t be harmful has been well and truly debunked by the scientists.
Doctors are warning that e-cigarette and vaping-associated lung injury (EVALI) is a real threat now, and that’s without having to wait for medium-to-long-term data to come in. Dr Sina Keihani has written a fascinating (and sobering) clinical update on page 47.
If this discretionary pollution of our lungs isn’t enough, there is the deteriorating state of the planet, and for us in Australia, on the brink of another fire season, that is of increasing concern.
I am lucky to be close enough to magical tracts of city bushland to take regular walks. Now these landscapes are just beginning to unfurl their spring colours. As I drove out of stunning Bold Park this morning, the radio news reported that fire protection officers were already concerned about the forecast predicting drier spring and the heavy fire load of our bush.
At best, and I use the term loosely, it means more burn-offs and at worst bushfires. With every bad fire season, a bad asthma season is heralded. At least we have a better understanding, thanks to local doctors GP Dr Tom Brett and respiratory physician Dr John Blakey what inhalers emit less harmful greenhouse gases.
Everything is connected, nothing just happens. It might have been a dippy hippy saying when I was a girl, but we all have to adopt conscious living. Our lungs and the planet’s lungs need us to.