UK teenager needed life support over vaping-linked disease

A British teenager who took up e-cigarettes to stop smoking at the age of 16 has urged others not to start vaping.

Ewan Fisher, 19, was put on life support after suffering serious respiratory failure which doctors have linked to vaping.

He said he developed a “choking cough” and was struggling to breathe before going to hospital, where he was treated for hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP) – a type of allergic reaction to something breathed in which results in inflammation of the lung tissue.

“I was vaping for about four or five months before I got ill. I’d say I was vaping about a normal amount – maybe 10 to 15 times a day,” he said.

“I switched to vaping because I thought it would be healthier and I was really into my boxing at the time so wanted to feel fit.”

Fisher’s life was saved after doctors connected him to an artificial lung in order to pump oxygen into the blood and around his body, before he began a slow recovery.

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“I was really struggling to breathe and they rushed me into a side ward and put canulas into me and it went downhill from there,” the teenager, from Arnold in Nottingham, told the Press Association. “I ended up in intensive care and needed two forms of life support. I almost died.”

Dr Jayesh Mahendra Bhatt, a consultant who treated Fisher, co-authored a paper in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood which warned that the “previously well young person presented with a catastrophic respiratory illness”.

“There are two important lessons here. The first is always to consider a reaction to e-cigarettes in someone presenting with an atypical respiratory illness. The second is that we consider e-cigarettes as ‘much safer than tobacco’ at our peril,” the paper concludes.

John Dunne, director of the UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA), told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the sector took all cases such as Fisher’s very seriously but added that it appeared to be more an allergic reaction than the vaping itself that had caused the illness.

“It’s very rare. If you look at what Public Health England (PHE) says about vaping they say it’s about 95% less harmful for you than smoking,” he said.

Rosanna O’Connor, director of drugs, alcohol, tobacco and justice at PHE, said: “We continue to keep the evidence under review, including all safety and health concerns reported to the e-cigarette regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

“However, smoking kills half of life-long smokers and accounts for almost 220 deaths in England every day.

“Our advice remains that while not completely risk free, UK regulated e-cigarettes carry a fraction of the risk of smoked tobacco.

“This view is held by many across the world, including the Royal College of Physicians, Cancer Research UK, the British Medical Association and the National Academy of Sciences in the US.”