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U.K. approves vaping to quit smoking, says it’s 95 percent safer – Metro US

U.K. approves vaping to quit smoking, says it’s 95 percent safer

U.K. approves vaping to quit smoking, says it’s 95 percent safer
Credit: www.vaping360.com

Vaping enthusiasts worldwide are cheering a decision by British regulators granting alicense to an e-cigarette – as a prescription to quit smoking traditional cigarettes.

The Guardian reported that “Britain’s drug regulators have given the go-ahead for a British American Tobacco cigarette to be sold as a medicine for quitting smoking.” The license is the firstever granted toan e-cigarette or vaping device in Britain for a specific medical use.

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The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency there in the U.K. said in a statement that it wanted to “ensure licensed nicotine-containing products – including e-cigarettes – which make medicinal claims are available and meet appropriate standards of safety, quality and efficacy to reduce the harms from smoking.”

Right now, the license only applies that that one specific device.

The BBC added that, now that regulators have approved the license, Britons could be provided the devices through the National Health Service, the U.K.’s national healthcare system.

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The decision follows an announcementin 2015 by Public Health England, a Britishexecutive branch agency, that e-cigarettes and vaping were “95 percent” safer than traditional tobacco cigarettes.Across the Atlantic, U.S. officials still refuse to endorse vaping or e-cigarettes as smoking cessation methods, however. American regulators insist that the devices have not been studied enough yet.

Still, health advocacy groups like the American Heart Association have said thatvaping is a healthier alternative – at least compared to the effects of traditional cigarettes.

While it doesn’t yet approve vaping for smoking cessation, the FDA does approve of several prescription and over-the-counter options that have been proven to helpAmerican smokers quit.

(The main image used in this article was provided by vaping360.com under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license agreement.)