Fewer People See E-Cigarettes as a Safe Alternative to Smoking Tobacco

The percentage of Americans who view e-cigarettes as a safer alternative to smoking tobacco is dropping, a new study suggests. Researchers found 43 percent of those surveyed in 2014 said they thought e-cigarettes were less harmful than cigarettes, compared with half of those surveyed in 2012, according to HealthDay.

The findings are published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“It’s a good thing that information about e-cigarettes’ possible adverse health effects has gotten out there, especially considering there wasn’t a government or public health push during the study years,” study leader Eric Ford of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in a news release. “When misinformation about health effects about any substances becomes widespread, it is usually very hard to reverse the trend. That somehow happened here.”