Doctors claim that vape consumption was one of the factors that contributed to the deterioration in the health of Sarah, who has asthma
Dominic Hughes and Lucy Watkinson
A 12-year-old British girl suffered a collapsed lung and spent four days in an induced coma. She told the BBC that children should never smoke vape.
Sarah Griffin suffers from asthma and smoked vape very often, until she was taken to hospital a month ago with breathing problems. Her mother, Mary, told the BBC that she was afraid of losing her daughter.
The British government has announced plans to restrict the promotion and sale of vapes to children. The proposals will be open for national public consultation for the next eight weeks.
The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, said that these proposals will “reverse the worrying rise in vape use among young people” by making vaporizers less colorful and less attractive to children.
UK Health Minister Steve Barclay stated that the government is committed to taking immediate action to create laws following the public consultation. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that “principals are concerned and parents are concerned” about vape companies’ marketing to young people.
At the recent conference of the opposition British Labour Party, parallel health minister Wes Streeting said that a possible Labour government would “go after” vape companies that offered children flavors such as “rainbow blast”.
The British government’s proposal
The UK government has announced a national consultation on its proposals to tackle vape smoking by young people. They include:
- restricting the scents and descriptions of vapes so that they are no longer aimed at children
keeping vapes out of sight of children in stores - regulating vaporizer packaging so that it is not directed at children
- check whether increasing the price of vapes might reduce the number of young users
- consider restrictions on the sale of disposable vapes, which, according to the ministers, are clearly linked to increased consumption by children and are immensely harmful to the environment.
Sarah Woolnough, from Asthma + Lung UK, says she would like to see restrictions on the marketing of vapes so that they are not aimed at children.
For her, “disposable vapes, with their current low prices, designs and chewing gum flavor options, are too attractive and easily accessible for children”.
The chief medical officer at the Department of Health in England, Chris Whitty, says that the sale of vapes or e-cigarettes to children is “absolutely unacceptable”.
But, according to him, the vape can be useful for smokers to give up tobacco, as it is “less dangerous than smoking”.
12 years old and in a coma
Sarah Griffin’s bedroom in her home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is like that of most 12-year-old girls – a dressing table full of make-up, perfume bottles and hair straighteners, as well as children’s dolls on the bed.
But that’s also where she used to hide her mother’s vaporizers. She even made holes in the carpet to prevent them from being found.
Sarah started smoking vape when she was just nine years old.
Her mother tried to stop her. She searched her when she got home and confiscated her cell phone. But to no avail.
Last British summer, Sarah consumed a 4,000 puff vaporizer in just a few days. Standard vaporizers hold 600 puffs.
Smoking vape was the first thing she did when she woke up and the last before going to sleep. She would fall asleep with the vaporizer on her pillow.
In the UK, it is illegal to sell vapes to people under 18. But Sarah was able to buy vaporizers in stores and became addicted to nicotine.
Sarah’s asthma and the misuse of her inhaler increased the risk of complications.
At the beginning of September, she came down with a cold. Combined with the vape, it formed what Sarah’s doctor describes as a “perfect storm”.
“Many risk factors progressed in the wrong direction,” says Dara O’Donoghue, a pediatrician specializing in respiratory diseases at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Belfast.
Sarah fell ill and was taken to hospital. An X-ray showed that only one of her lungs was working properly – and she wasn’t responding to treatment.
Within hours, she was in intensive care. Shortly afterwards, she was placed in an induced coma in the hope that her condition would stabilize.
For Mary, Sarah’s mother, the moment was one of despair. “There are no words to describe the moment when you think your daughter is going to die,” she says.
After four days, Sarah was gradually revived. She is now recovering, but her lungs have been permanently damaged.
“She does lung exercises. That’s something you’d expect from an 80-year-old, not a 12-year-old,” says her mother.
“Open your eyes because this is happening everywhere, perhaps to your child too,” warns Mary.
“No matter what you think, people like to think that their children aren’t doing these things, but the reality is very, very different.”
Sarah hopes that her experience will help other young people her age to wake up to the risks posed by vaping.
“Don’t start smoking because once you start, you can’t stop,” she advises. “Basically, you only stop when you have to, when the situation is life or death.”
O’Donoghue says that vape smoking by young people is an “emergency situation” that needs to be tackled “urgently”.
For the doctor, “we need to raise awareness about vapes because the health problems associated with them are only just beginning to appear”.
Recent figures indicate that one in five children between the ages of 11 and 17 in the UK have tried vaping. This number has increased threefold compared to 2020.
Vape smoking among younger children is also on the rise – around one in ten children between the ages of 11 and 15, according to a 2021 survey. And many countries around the world are seeing similar trends.
Fidelma Carter, from the Northern Ireland Chest, Heart and Stroke organization, says that 17% of young vape smokers consume the product regularly.
“Young people are smoking vape because they think there’s no risk, there’s no danger,” she explains. “And we want to disprove the misconceptions and raise awareness that vape smoking can harm people’s health and well-being.”