What chemicals are people inhaling?

Vaping doesn't produce ordinary water vapour. It produces an aerosol containing various substances.

These can include:

• Nicotine.
   
• Formaldehyde and other potentially harmful chemicals.
• Acrolein, which can irritate the respiratory system.
•  Volatile organic compounds.
  
•  Metals such as nickel, chromium and lead, which can originate from heating components.
  
•  Flavouring chemicals whose safety when inhaled may differ from their safety when eaten.

Does vaping cause cancer?

We know that some chemicals found in vape aerosols are carcinogenic or potentially carcinogenic.

However, we don't yet have sufficient long-term human evidence to establish how much vaping increases cancer risk.

Cigarette smoking has decades of evidence linking it to numerous cancers. Vaping has not been around long enough to provide equivalent long-term data.

It would therefore be wrong to say vaping causes cancer at the same rate as smoking, but equally wrong to say it carries no cancer risk.