2023-12-10 00:19:51

The night of last October 27 was the longest for Mario Calero Molina, a 53-year-old accountant, father of two 16-year-old teenage sons. They are twins and are in tenth grade. Until that day, this father of the family thought that he had built a relationship with them with enough trust to not keep secrets from each other. But that night the Calero brothers attended an “unmissable” Halloween party, organized by some friends from school.

Something healthy, they explained at home. “I reluctantly let them go, with the commitment that, in the evening, at midnight they had to return,” says Mario. However, the promise was not fulfilled. At 1:00 am, Matías’s trembling voice on the other end of the phone made it clear to Mario that something was not right. The two brothers were in the emergency service of the Valle del Lili clinic, in Cali.

Vapeadores. | Foto: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Matías, along with two friends, had arrived with Samuel, the other brother, almost fainting, with a pounding heart and difficulty breathing. Only until that night did Mario find out that his son, a good student, an América fan and brilliant at chess, had been a regular user of vapes for six months.

Doctors explained that Samuel had the symptoms of acute lung injury, a health condition associated with the consumption of vaping devices, which causes breathing difficulties and saturation in the lungs, in addition to tachycardia, palpitations and fever. In the most severe cases it can even cause diarrhea, vomiting and nausea.

“What they explained to me at that moment is that being locked up for several hours in a space with several other people vaping generated that crisis; I almost lost my son to those damn vapers,” says the father of the family.

The situation is going to get worse

Doctor Diego Acosta knows well what it is regarding. He is a pulmonologist at the Keralty Clinic in Ibagué and medical director of the Pulsar Pulmonology Unit, also in the capital of Tolima. Acosta says it bluntly: “We are facing a major health problem. And what we are seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg of a situation that in a few years is only going to get worse, as more and more younger children are accessing vaping devices and using them without any type of control.”

And remember that just a few weeks ago the worrying findings of the study ‘Initial perspectives on diseases associated with vaping in Colombia: evidence for action’ were known, which abridged information from the 2019 National Survey on the Consumption of Psychoactive Substances (ENCSP) and the Health Benefits Information System (Rips), of the Colombian health system.

The young man was close to losing his life due to his addiction to vaping devices. | Photo: Twitter: @Wilmington_ / Getty Images

Led by the Industrial University of Santander (UIS), the investigation revealed, for the first time in the country, that there have been deaths related to the use of these devices. Thus, between 2020 and 2022, 59 deaths and 245 cases of people with diseases associated with the use of vaping devices were recorded.

These numbers once once more raised alarm bells in Colombia regarding the serious effects of vaping on the health of children and young people.

“This is because these devices are made with substances that are not made to be inhaled by humans, especially at high temperatures. These cause damage to the lungs, to the alveoli, and a severe inflammatory process. We must not forget that in 2019, before the pandemic, there were more than a hundred deaths of young people in the United States due to the use of vaping devices. In other cases, it leaves irreversible damage, since the lungs develop up to the age of 20.”

Furthermore, he says, “the presence of cannabinoids has been proven in order to generate greater addiction in consumers,” says Acosta.

Meryt Perea, mother of a 15-year-old girl, came to understand this, for whom it took three months to have a severe injury to her lungs due to the use of vaping devices. She had an aggravating factor: she had suffered from asthma in her childhood. “After several treatments, her asthma symptoms disappeared following she was 6 years old. But with the vape it was like starting from scratch with that disease,” says this businesswoman, owner of a florist shop.

In these cases, says Acosta, the injuries can be even more severe than those produced by the most serious symptoms of covid-19. “And it may happen that young people who have overcome asthma as children see the disease reactivated once more with constant vaping.”

The study ‘Initial perspectives on diseases associated with vaping in Colombia: evidence for action’, which summarized information from the 2019 National Survey on the Consumption of Psychoactive Substances (ENCSP) and the Health Benefits Information System (Rips), confirmed 59 deaths from vaping in the country. | Photo: Pexels

For Carlos Bonna, pediatric pulmonologist at Sanitas, there are two aspects that worry doctors: on the one hand, the false belief among young people that vaping does not cause harm and, on the other hand, that they do not consume in public, since in schools and many homes it is prohibited.

“So what you notice is that a consultation, which normally lasts 30 minutes, sometimes becomes up to an hour with these patients because they do not easily reveal that they are regular users of vapers for fear of being singled out.”

With the new devices, there is a potential for the risk of addiction to be higher than with conventional cigarettes because some e-cigarettes are using a synthetic nicotine, Llorente says. | Photo: 123rf / El País

He says that most of those who now come to him for consultation are betrayed by a persistent cough. “Nicotine, a substance present in vaping devices, has important cardiovascular effects and promotes the appearance of arteriosclerosis, increased heart rate and blood pressure. And that becomes a bomb because it finally produces adrenaline and a coronary vasoconstrictor and can cause, depending on the dose, a heart attack.”

“When I leave my work, in the north of Bogotá, I see a well-dressed young man selling a wide variety of electronic cigarettes. Like the old conventional cigarette stands on the street. But those who buy them do not really know how many milligrams of nicotine they are consuming and, even worse, what other substances they are putting in the liquid part. Some disreputable laboratories put cannabis, heroin, fentanyl and even cocaine in it.”

Law once morest vaping

One of the biggest concerns of the medical community in Colombia is the lack of regulation for the consumption and marketing of electronic cigarettes and vaping devices, especially among minors.

For some, hope is placed in the so-called vaping law, which seeks to update and modify the Anti-Tobacco Law 1335 of 2009. The idea is to adapt the use of electronic cigarettes and vaping devices “to the new realities that have emerged since 2009. In this way, smoking and vaping systems will be regulated, in such a way that guarantees of protection of the right to health of Colombians, especially minors, can be provided,” as explained by its author, the Senator José David Name, of the U Party.

The highest prevalence of consumption of these products is found in the population aged 18 to 24, with 11.9%, followed by children and adolescents aged 12 to 17, with 6.7%.

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