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Health officials want GPs to be able to prescribe e-cigarettes on NHS

Hand holding an electronic cigarette over a dark background.
Hand holding an electronic cigarette over a dark background. Hand holding an electronic cigarette over a dark background.

BRITISH government health officials want to see GPs able to prescribe e-cigarettes on the NHS, they said today as they published a review that said vaping is 95 per cent less harmful than tobacco.

Public Health England (PHE) said much of the public wrongly believes that e-cigarettes carry health risks in the same way cigarettes do, but this is not the case and they want to see smokers taking up the electronic devices to reduce the thousands of people dying from tobacco-related diseases every year.

Health experts said that although GPs and stop smoking services are not able to prescribe or recommend e-cigarettes as none of the products on the market are licensed for medicinal purposes, they hope the MHRA (Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) will do so soon.

They said there is no evidence so far that e-cigarettes are acting as a route into smoking for children or non-smokers, with almost all the 2.6 million adults using them in Britain either current or ex-smokers, and most of them using the devices to help them quit or stop returning to tobacco.

While it is hard to quantify how many lives could be saved by people switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes, they said around 80,000 deaths a year in England are caused by smoking – the greatest cause of preventable deaths.

Professor Ann McNeill, of King’s College London and an independent author of the review, said e-cigarettes could be a “game changer in public health”.

The PHE-commissioned review said smoking among both adults and youths continues to decline and e-cigarette use may be contributing to this.

But it said that as the evidence surrounding their safety has grown, distrust of the devices has increased amongst the public.

Professor Peter Hajek, of Queen Mary University London and another independent author of the review, told a briefing in central London that nicotine carries very few health risks and is much less poisonous than previously believed.

He said the main health issues surrounding e-cigarettes concern other ingredients, contaminants and by-products, which can generate some toxicants – but these are at the very low levels found in the air that people breathe.

“My reading of the evidence is that smokers who switch to vaping remove almost all the risks smoking poses to their health,”

he added.

Professor Kevin Fenton, director of health and well-being at PHE, said people who use e-cigarettes to help them to quit smoking would see the best results if this was carried out in conjunction with their local stop smoking

services. The best thing that a smoker can do is to quit and to quit forever and that there a range of tools which are available to help all smokers quit,” he said was the message PHE wanted to get out.