As I’ve noted before I get entirely lost in the SI system. The number of zeros just confuses.
Vaping is exposing teenagers to lead and uranium that could “adversely affect brain and organ development”, a study has found.
Researchers analysed the urine samples of 200 people aged 13 to 17 who used e-cigarettes and found that frequent users had significantly higher levels of toxic chemicals present in their system.
Regular vapers had up to 40 per cent more lead and double the amount of uranium in their urine samples compared with those who only used vapes occasionally.
OK.
The paper is here. Worth noting that the comparison they don;t do is with smokers – whose levels will be substantially higher, tobacco, like other plants (in fact, perhaps more than many) picks up heavy metals from the soil it grows in.
But those actual levels:
Lead (ng/mg creatinine)* 0.16 (0.13 to 0.19) 0.21 (0.14 to 0.30) 0.20 (0.16 to 0.24)
Just sticking with lead for rare, occasional, regular users.
Blood lead concentrations for healthy adult suburbanites is 7 to 22 µg/100 g whole blood [2]. Urine has a wider range, 4 to 270 µg/g creatinine, for the same population; however, most normal values should be near 16 to 60 µg/g creatinine [4]. Blood lead values are commonly used for biological monitoring.
Converting ng/mg to funnym/g just isn’t one of those things for me.
But are these levels found within vapers entirely and wholly – or not – within the normal variations?
Yes, yes, already noted that this study doesn’t tell us anything useful anyway, we’d want to know variation against smoking. But even after that is this anything important or not?
@Tim
As I’ve noted before I get entirely lost in the SI system. The number of zeros just confuses.
It seems you have one of the key attributes of a Guardian reporter ….. 🙂
Even they noted that and got rid of me 15 years ago…..https://www.theguardian.com/profile/timworstall
3 orders of magnitude for each step is all you need to know. Milli, micro, nano, pico, femto.
Given increasing sensitivities of testing soon the Grauniad and its scientifically illiterate readers will be panicking about pico gramme/g levels of stuff
Whatever the subject, we know it’s only propaganda with statements like that. Double fuck all is still fuck all.
The biggest problem these cunts have with vaping is that someone somewhere might enjoy it.
m is milli: 10^-3 or 1/1,000
µ (Greek mu) is micro: 10^-6 or 1/1,000,000
n is nano: 10^-9 or 1/1,000,000,000
Oh I expect it shows up in their BMI’s. The ones with the lead will be overweight & the ones with the uranium obese. And glow in the dark. We need signs in lifts. No more than 4 persons to avoid critical mass
Greek cows go µ
Ottokring – I think it’s the cats that μ
TMB lol
And for my dinner tonight I shall η π
I remember doing radiochemistry as part of my undergraduate chemistry degree at the time the SI unit of radioactivity ‘the bequerel’ was introduced – my tutor told us it was in essence a buggeral.
To actually answer the question, ng/mg is the same as µg/g.
This is an interesting sentence:
Both intermittent (0.21 ng/mg creatinine) and frequent users (0.20 ng/mg creatinine) had higher urine lead levels than occasional users (0.16 ng/mg creatinine).
The fact that intermittent users had slightly higher levels than frequent users suggests there’s an awful lot of noise in the data, and it’s notable that this result is the one where they don’t give a p figure, which would make the suspicious think it wasn’t actually statistically significant
@Andrew Again.
It wouldn’t surprise you that the actual values are on the picogram/milligram level..
So yeah… It’s 40%… The actual amount… Ummm.. yeah… hrrmmm…
Sorry …trying to keep my face straight here…
Impressive amounts of confidence in the equipment they use..
Back when I was doing physics in school, and then worrying about what was still NBC warfare (nuclear, biological, chemical – these days it’s “chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear”) I understood radiation in the old CGS units of rads and rems, on the basis that getting a dose of 450 rems was going to quite quickly put you out of action with a good chance of dying.
It’s interesting that despite being reasonably numerate and adaptable, I’ve struggled to get along with the shift to Becquerels, Grays and Sieverts… in part because, as Arthur Dent says, the becquerel is such a miniscule measure that it has to be into mega-, giga- and tera-Bq to apply to anything remotely useful or relevant (a typical human’s generating four or five kiloBq of ionising radiation from stuff like potassium-40, more if you like bananas, without any help)
Of course nobody would do this to make “radiation numbers” sound more scary. It’s like measuring the length of the Humber Bridge in angstroms just because “big number” suits the story better…
So, 6 orders of magnitude between nano- and milli. One nano- per milli- is equivalent to 1 gram per tonne.
So, Lead 0.16ng/mg (1/10^9) is:
0160.000000000µg/mg (1/10^6)
0160000.000000mg/mg (1/10^3)
0160000000.000g/mg (1/10^0)
0160000000.000g/mg is (1/10^3)
0160000.000000g/g (1/10^0)
22 µg/100g is:
2.200000000 µg/10g
0.220000000 µg/g
0220.000000 mg/g
0220000.000 g/g
So you’re comparing 160,000,000 with 220,000
or 160,000 with 220
or 16,000 with 22
or 1,600 with 2.2
or 800 with 1.1
or 720 with 1
But, fundamentally, you’re comparing 160,000 with 1. That being 0.16ng/mg. So amazing that technology has advanced that we can measure such insignificant amounts. C minus for mixing up units. D for mixing up per 1x and per 100x. See me after class.
If the study wasn’t pre registered the results have probably been tortured out of the data.
With n at only 200 my first thought was how have they controlled for environmental factors and low and behold:
They didn’t even consider the environment and lifestyles and there’s no mention of a control group, so the study is meaningless, but they still had the gall to write this:
My emphasis in both cases.
That’s what passes for The Science nowadays and no doubt politicians will lap it up.
Feynmann called this ‘cargo science’. They go through the ritual, but they don’t understrand what they are doing or why.
The values quoted are clearly suspect, as { rare, occasional, regular } users do not show a progression. Random noise.
Modern detection is so sensitive it can find almost anything in anything at the ppt level.
Lead is endemic in the environment, particularly in cities in urban areas. 50 years of leaded petrol. Lead water pipes. lead paint. Note that lead paint is mandated by law for red in safety signs.
Uranium is part of granite, so Cornwall and Aberdeen need immediate evacuation! Not.
And as you say, the primary interest is how does vaping compare to smoking?
This study is scientifically illiterate propaganda from the bansturbators.
Lions please Steve.
One sided study. Someone got paid for this drivel.
I thoroughly expect there to be an intermediate factor. Such as frequent vape use is more common in low wage city areas, or in industrial workers, or they eat more big macs, or similar.
“despite being reasonably numerate and adaptable, I’ve struggled to get along with the shift to Becquerels, Grays and Sieverts”: moi aussi. And the bastards do these sort of unit swaps without even consulting me.
“Never mind the accuracy, look at the resolution!”
“they don’t give a p figure”
*snigger*
@Sam Duncan: You’ll be amused to know that when the statistics aren’t good, researchers indulge in something called p hacking to get publishable results.
@AtC
p-hacking, also known as taking the piss. Or, maybe in this case the urineium.
I’ll get my coat.
There is no point comparing urine with blood, even if you correct for creatinine.
Also heavy metals are not something for which there is an “upper level of normal”. The desirable upper limit of lead, mercury, uranium is zero, the reality is that that is unrealistic, unachievable, and there is (other than stop eating lead and uranium) nothing to be done if you are above some artificially set intervention level. The actual numbers probably vary immensely with locality, diet, etc.
Scary number of zeros junk science.
frequent users had significantly higher levels of toxic chemicals present in their system
It’s always worth remembering that correlation, and in this case poor correlation, is not causation
Gosh, just searched mouth piece materials for vapes, drip tips in other words and what wonderful choices there are: delrin plastic, etherymide, resin, stainless steel, gold and more. You’d expect traces of some of the metal ones to end up in your body, but you do science by predicting how much, then go find out. Compare to people who put musical instruments in their mouths, cigarettes, thumbs and nothing.
I attempted a basic sanity check on table 1. It says that there were 200 people studied who took an average of 9 puffs each (so a total of 1800 puffs). It then breaks this down into Occasional (65 taking 0.9 = 58.6), Intermittent (45 taking 7.9 = 355.5), and Frequent (81 taking 27 = 2187). This leaves 200-65-45-81 = 9 with no figure (possibly these are the ones mentioned as not repoting usage who were coded as zero), but that doesn’t matter because when you add up the puffing for the three groups you get that they took a total of 2601.1 puffs – a lot more than the supposed total of 1800.
And in any case, who counts the number of puffs when vaping? Since users were asked to supply this figure, it’s completely bogus. It’s bad enough trying to get people to tell you very concrete things about them such as their weight, height or shoe size, but asking them to remember and report other stuff is wildly inaccurate.
The figures for lead may pass statistical tests, but are clearly meaningless. Even taken as face value, the increase from 0.16 to 0.21 for occasional to intermittent users is far too small. Remember the intermittent users are puffing away over 8 times as much. And the Frequent vapers are puffing 30 times as much as the occasional ones, yet still the increase is only to 0.16 to 0.20 – the whole thing is just not credible.
And in any case, why go to all this effort to measure the level of substances which could be directly measured from specimens of the actual vaping equipment and supplies? It’s just asking for trouble.
Don’t they have beagles to do these experiments any more ?
They’d probably be much more accurate.
And no-one spotted my pg/g comment about Gaurdian readers worry levels, and read pg/mg. How these orders of magnitude are easily confused by laypeople like journalists shows how pointless journalists are nowadays with their click baiting.