14/09/2024
Va**ng
I'm really glad to see the tough stance Australia is taking on va**ng and I wish NZ would do the same. You might argue that it's less harmful than smoking and it's a good way to get off smoking and it's probably true. But it's not good if you stay on it. A colleague of mine predicts we will in years to come see an epidemic of "pop-corn lung" due to va**ng. It probably won't be called that but it's not a bad name because va**rs, like smokers, will wind up with lungs that look a bit like popcorn. This is how it works. In the original days of American popcorn manufacture on an industrial scale, workers would lean over vats of boiling oil, stirring in corn kernals to make popcorn. They inhale microscopic drops of oil that are small enough to pass through the smallest airways and wind up in the alveoli, the small sacs at the end where the oxygen actually get into the blood. Now the larger airways are all lined with a protective blanket of mucus-laden hairs called cilia, which trap inhaled dust and sweep it back out of the lungs. You might cough up the resulting sputum or swallow it unconsciously, but it's gone! Nice clean lungs! However the alveoli do not have this mechanism, the cilia stops before you the alveoli, and if you swallow coal dust or oil droplets or smoke or asbestos or any other thing which is small enough to get into the alveoli, it stays there. Now here's the nasty bit. Your immune system - macrophages and other white cells, are tough little thick-skinned killers laden with nasty enzymes that destroy things. The macrophages "eat" anything they don't recognise, destroy it inside their tough cell body, and get rid it. They are the Robo-cops, the true hunter-killer nano-bots of our bodies. Only, guess what. These guys evolved in a world where their main enemies were bacteria and viruses, and they do a reasonable job at killing them a lot of the time. Not perfect, but pretty good. But they can't actually destroy some oils (or tar, or coal dust, or asbestos or any of the other nasty things we inhale if we are not careful and don't wear adequate airway protection) and in their efforts they rupture, spilling out all those nasty destructive enzymes into the surrounding lung tissue. Every time a macrophage dies like that, it leaves a small puddle of destroyed lung tissue around it. Very small but over time they build up. You eventually get lungs just as destroyed as those of a smoker. And under a microscope, they probably look similar to a smoker's lungs.
The same is true of any inhaled dust or smoke or fumes. In parts of the world the majority of COPD cases are not in smokers, but in women who cook over open fires inside small poorly ventilated shacks. ANYTHING you inhale, is potentially dangerous. Don't smoke, don't v**e, and do wear protection whenever you're inhaling anything other than fresh air.
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