Prof Rachel Isba who runs a newly created clinic for vaping addiction at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital on Merseyside, said that they are treating kids as young as 11
Children as young as 11 are now being treated for vaping addiction at a clinic specifically set up for young people.
The size of the problem is shown by the opening of the centre at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital on Merseyside in January to help kids with an addiction to vaping, and if it is successful then the aim is for the scheme to be introduced around the country. Prof Rachel Isba runs the pioneering service for children aged as young as 11 but she says that some are vaping aged six and seven.
And she tells how “alarming” numbers of children are becoming nicotine dependent. “I’ll ask them ‘when you wake up in the morning, how long is it before you first use your vape’… and some children are vaping before they get out of bed, which they perhaps wouldn’t do if it’s a cigarette,” she told the Mirror.
“It’s on their bedside table with them next to their mobile phone.” Around a million 11-17-year-olds have tried vaping in the UK, with an estimated 230,000 vaping more than once a week according to figures from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).
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Children are also being warned on YouTube and Instagram about getting addicted to vaping in a new Government campaign, launched last month.
Called Love Your Lungs, will see influencers including Big Manny and Bodalia appeal to teenagers aged 13 to 18 on social media. The Department of Health and Social Care said that it is the first nationwide campaign across England to inform young people about vaping and nicotine addiction.
It has commissioned a short video which depicts a woman in a toxic relationship, which transpires to be a relationship with her vape. Many health experts advocate the use of vapes among smokers as a method to help them quit but they say children who have never smoked should not start vaping.
Prof Isba, a consultant in paediatric public health medicine at Lancaster University, said she was shocked to discover there was no NHS service to help children who wanted to quit vaping.
“I was doing an engagement session with children and young people, and asked them: ‘If you went to hospital for something, while you are waiting, is there anything we could do to improve your health and wellbeing more generally?’,” she told The Times.
“One of the young people said: ‘Can you do something about vaping? Adults need to do something about vaping.’ And then the other young people started saying: ‘Oh yeah, it’s a nightmare.’ That’s what first sowed the seed for starting a clinic.”
Prof Isba believes that part of the problem is caused by children seeing their parents vaping. “For adults, vapes can be used as a harm-reduction approach in smoking cessation, but that is because smoking is so bad for human health that most things are not as bad as smoking. The issue is that children aren’t using vapes to stop smoking, they are just vaping,” she reportedly said.
Meanwhile, one fifth of children were found to vape regularly, had tried it out or had previously vaped regularly, in a survey of 6,000 kids by Healthwatch Trafford in Greater Manchester. Worryingly 31% said they had their first vape in the morning while still in bed.
And one child on vaping said: “If the world around us is visibly screwed and we might not last long, why try [to live for a long time]? Why care?”
As well as offering nicotine patches and gum, the Alder Hey clinic offers talking therapy to help young people to manage peer pressure around vaping and to understand other impacts it has on their lives.
Prof Isba said: “I try and to get them to think about the impact of of their vaping, perhaps in a way that they haven’t thought about it consciously. They might not know until they’ve thought about how much they spend on vapes a week… if they spend £20 a week on vapes, if they stop vaping today, a year from now, they’d have £1,000 pounds.”
Alder Hey said it decided to launch the service after finding that young people were consistently asking for a service like this. It is illegal in the UK to sell vapes to anyone under the age of 18, but authorities are also becoming increasingly concerned with counterfeit vapes boasting dangerously high numbers of ‘puffs’, and vapes containing drugs such as cannabinoid spice.