Hi there, I'm Mrs. Kemp and welcome to today's lesson all about vaping.

So let's get started then.

So our outcome for today is I can explain the effects of nicotine on the body and evaluate the risks of vaping.

Some of the key terms that we'll be using today then are on the screen here.

If you would like more time to read those over, please do pause the video, but do rest assured that I will be talking about each one of those as we move through the slide deck.

Okay, we've got two learning cycles today.

There's one on vaping and then one on the emergence of new scientific understanding.

We'll start by explaining vaping then.

So have you ever seen these items before? What do you think they all have in common? Have a little think.

Did you realise that all of these are a type of nicotine replacement therapy for smoking? So we've got nicotine gum there, we've got some e-cigarettes or vapes you might know them as.

And then finally we've got some nicotine patches.

So all of these items are ways of getting that nicotine into the body to try to stop people from smoking.

Nicotine is a highly addictive drug then that's found in tobacco.

In 2020 it's thought that 22.

3% of the world's population were using using some kind of tobacco product.

So whether that be something like a cigarette or a cigar.

Tobacco actually kills about 8 million people each year, including an estimated 1.

3 million non-smokers that have been exposed to secondhand smoke.

So that could mean that you live in a household with somebody that smokes, and so when they smoke in the house then you are breathing that in.

It's the reason that our government in the UK actually banned people from smoking in public places.

You probably will never have experienced that, but actually when I was a lot younger then people were able to smoke in restaurants, in bars kind of everywhere and you were breathing in that smoke, which could also cause you to get cancer.

So smokers have started to realise that it's not a great thing, okay? And people may then try to give up and because nicotine is highly addictive, it's quite hard to give up.

And so companies have come up with ideas of trying to replace that nicotine in some other way.

And vapes, it was one of those products.

They're meant to provide that person then with the nicotine but without any of those toxic chemicals that you get from smoking.

What that can help with then is something called a withdrawal symptom.

Now, withdrawal symptom is something that somebody gets when they stop taking a drug that they have been addicted to, and they may also get certain cravings associated with stopping smoking.

Withdrawal symptoms are not very nice and they make a person feel kind of unwell because they're not taking that drug.

The things that people might experience from nicotine withdrawal then are things like irritability and anxiety.

You might actually know a person that has tried to give up smoking or has given up smoking and there will be a period of time where they feel a little bit more cranky.

They might be a little bit more moody because actually they're experiencing that withdrawal from the nicotine.

Okay, so one of these ways then is this vaping, okay? And usually what it is it's a mix, a little liquid mix of nicotine additives and flavouring so that they can make them taste nicer than if you were just having the nicotine in a liquid.

That liquid gets heated until it becomes a vapour, hence being called vaping.

And then the person inhales that into their lungs, which is very, very similar to the action of smoking, which is why a lot of people that are giving up say that it's maybe a better replacement than the patches or the gum because it's actually mimicking that feeling of smoking.

Unlike cigarettes though they don't produce carbon monoxide, sorry, which can be harmful to a person's lung.

That carbon monoxide when you take it in basically replaces some of the oxygen molecules in your red blood cells.

So you can't carry that oxygen as efficiently around your body.

The UK has put tight restrictions on vapes, all right? They cannot be sold to people under the age of 18.

Just like with cigarettes then they also need to have particular warnings on their packagings and you also, you are not allowed to advertise them in newspapers, online, radio or television sites, okay? There is a real risk of advertising that actually it can make people want to have a product even more.

So by preventing that from being advertised the government hopes that people will not take up vaping.

Unfortunately, though there are a lot of people vaping now and actually one the negative effects from vaping is that you can see the packages lying around everywhere in our environment littering our streets.

Just like when people were just discarding the cigarettes, they're now just throwing the vapes on the floor, which are often made of plastics and metals and the packaging is made of cardboard, which actually could be recycled.

There are also the fact that they have battery packs in them and so they will have a certain amount of battery acid and also they can combust and they will set fire to rubbish tips.

So they are actually becoming a real pain for the environment.

So let's think about that nicotine again and some of the negative effects that can happen from that nicotine.

Remember that we have coronary arteries.

These are the blood vessels that surround the heart and provide the heart with blood.

Now, one of the effects of nicotine can be that it can narrow those blood vessels so the blood vessels get smaller in size inside them and that means that the blood flow to the heart can be restricted.

That means that the heart's not going to get enough oxygen to those cardiac muscle cells for cellular respiration.

This could result in a heart attack and of course a heart attack could potentially lead to death.

It can also lead to a rise in blood pressure and increase your heart rate.

So we've got a little picture there if you may have a watch that actually can measure your heart rate.

There's also a blood pressure monitor there that you can buy it from home and you can put it onto your wrist and it will tell you what your blood pressure is.

So a high blood pressure will put a strain on the blood vessels that are travelling around your body and can also damage them because of that.

This can lead to heart disease and even a possible heart attack again.

If their blood pressure is higher, it means the heart's going to have to beat more frequently and essentially work harder.

That faster beating then will require more oxygen and glucose to fuel respiration, and so it's a constant cycle of the heart having to beat faster and that potential damage happening to the heart.

So which addictive chemical is in a vape? Is it A, carbon monoxide, B, nicotine, or C, tar? I'll give you a moment to think about it, but if you need more time, please pause the video.

Okay, did you get nicotine? Excellent.

Well done.

Alright, onto our first task of the day.

What I would like you to do is get your worksheets out for me and I would like you to create a patient leaflet to show the harmful effects of nicotine on the body.

I will give you some time to think about it, but if you need more time, please pause the video.

Okay then.

So on your leaflet, hopefully you've got a really lovely title and maybe you've got some diagrams to kind of represent these different things.

So the things that you should have also included then is that actually nicotine is highly addictive and makes it difficult for a person to stop vaping or smoking once you start.

It can narrow the blood vessels, which will restrict the blood flow to the coronary arteries.

This could lead to a heart attack or death.

It can cause high blood pressure putting a strain on the blood vessels and can damage them causing heart disease or a heart attack.

It can also cause the heart to beat more rapidly, which puts more pressure on the heart.

Okay, excellent.

Hope you've included all of those different things.

Onto our final learning cycle then, which is the emergence of new scientific understanding.

Okay now, did you realise that actually people started growing tobacco plants back in America in 6000 BC? So 6000 before Christ.

It's a really, really long time that people have been using the tobacco plant.

It actually wasn't until a much, much later time, 1912, that that link between smoking and lung cancer was first made.

By about 1967 there was a definitive link so they actually could show that there was a link between smoking and lung cancer.

Unfortunately, tobacco companies didn't actually admit this until 1997, so they didn't actually say, yes, we agree there is a definite link between smoking and lung cancer.

Obviously for the tobacco companies, this was very damaging for them, okay? They will have lost a great deal of money because previously kind of they've got doctors and everything to say that smoking was fine and you could smoke and there was no issues from it whatsoever.

So by admitting responsibility for the fact that actually no, it is quite damaging and can kill you, they obviously would put off people from smoking.

Now, what the tobacco companies argued then is that correlation doesn't always mean causation.

What does that actually mean? So a correlation is a pattern, okay? Causation is mean that there is something that is definitely making that pattern happen.

Let me illustrate that with a different example.

So here we've got a graph that shows the number of shark attacks, which is our blue line and the number of ice cream sales, which is that sort of greenish line, okay? Now what you can see is that they both seem to peak at the same point, okay? They're both going up in the summer months and they're really peaking just between July and August.

So we're getting lots of ice cream sales and we're getting lots of shark attacks at the same time.

So from that maybe we could say that actually because people buy ice cream, they get attacked by sharks, okay? That is something that we could say is a correlation in that graph, okay? Do you agree with that? Do you think that by eating ice cream when you go in the sea you are more likely to get attacked by a shark? Have a little think about that for a moment.

No, it's unlikely to be true, isn't it? Actually a more sensible suggestion is probably that during the summer months you're buying ice cream and you are also going in the sea.

So therefore you are more likely to come into contact with a shark.

In December there's not likely to be many people that are buying ice cream, although there are still some people and also there's a really, really small number of people going in the sea 'cause it'll be freezing, so therefore they're just not going to come into contact with a shark.

So this is an example of where there is a correlation, but it doesn't actually mean causation.

One doesn't mean the other happened and this is what the tobacco companies argued then.

They said that just because somebody is smoking and getting cancer doesn't mean that the smoking is the thing that causes the cancer.

Now scientists, when they first discover that there is a possible link between two things, actually want to be 95% confident that that link is not just due to chance, okay? So only 5% less of possibly thinking this might actually just be due to chance not one being caused by the other after all.

This is quite hard to prove because actually lifestyle diseases such as cancer really do tend to take a long time to develop.

And so in order to get that 95% confidence is going to take a really long time for you to get those results, okay? It also means that you've gotta gather a really large amount of data to prove it, okay? Which equally is going to take a lot of time and a lot of resources.

So let's put that idea of it is gonna take a long time with a lot of resources in order to prove a causal link to think about these vapes.

Now, actually, unlike cigarettes, which were around from a lot longer, the first vape pattern, so actually sort of like the plans for it was granted in about 1930, but actually no product was made.

Okay? So the first idea for them came at 1930, but they didn't actually make anything.

There was no prototype or anything.

The first viable e-cigarette was 2003, okay? So this is quite recent in terms of human history.

We now have about 3.

6 million people just in the UK.

So this isn't global, this is just in the UK using those vapes regularly, it's probably about half the number of smokers.

There's already been some potential risks of vaping then.

There's been links to COPD, okay? Which remember an example of that is emphysema where the alveoli get damaged and it can lead to a smaller surface area in your lungs and therefore reduced gas exchange.

We already know that nicotine can raise blood pressure and heart rate, so therefore by taking it as a vape, it's still going to have those effects on the body.

As I said about the batteries earlier, they can actually explode, okay? And they are doing on sort of rubbish dumps, but equally some products have been exploding on people whilst they've been vaping and it has caused real serious injuries to those people.

Nicotine of course, is addictive and so therefore if people start vaping they are going to become addicted to that nicotine.

There's also been a link with it being a gateway to other drugs, okay? So things like using cannabis, which is illegal and actually if you start vaping, you are more likely to then move on to other things.

However, because it's been so little time that people have started vaping, actually I think the greatest risks probably are unknown at the moment.

Although vapes do contain less chemicals as original cigarettes do, they actually have quite a lot of chemicals in them that have health risks that we don't even know about, okay? Scientists are constantly finding out about different things that are found in these vapes and what they're doing and they're releasing this information as they find it out.

One study actually found 2000 different chemical compounds in four different types of popular e-cigarette or vape brands.

So that is still a really large amount of chemicals.

Often these vapes are coming in from places that are maybe not being regulated properly and they've got all kinds of different flavourings and things in them that have got lots of different chemicals.

Most of these 2000 different chemicals were actually not identifiable, so we have no idea what they are or what they could do.

However, they did identify six potentially harmful chemicals and ones that had already been linked to respiratory irritation.

So that means that they're irritating the inside of that lung.

The lungs can become inflamed and things like that.

They also found industrial chemicals, which of course we know are also found in cigarettes.

Pesticides, so things that kill pests essentially.

So things that we use in our farming industry and also caffeine.

They found caffeine in there, which is the drug that we find in coffee and tea.

Okay, onto our next check then.

So this is a true or false.

Scientists want to be 95% sure the correlation or pattern in their results is not due to chance.

Is that true or false? Can you justify your answer? They only need a very small possibility of their results being correlated or B, they only want a very small possibility of their results being correlated due to chance.

I'll give you a moment to think about it, but if you need more time, please pause the video.

Okay, did you realise that that's true? Yes, of course it is 'cause we only want that 5% chance, that very, very small chance that that correlation is due to chance.

Okay, brilliant.

Well done Onto our final task of the day then.

So you can get your worksheets out for task B.

And this is Jun.

He's worried about a friend at school who has started vaping.

His friends have said that vaping is harmless and he shouldn't worry.

Write a text message for Jun to send to his friend explaining that scientific ideas can change over time and why we should be concerned about young people vaping.

I'll give you a moment to think about it, but if you need more time, please pause the video.

Okay, did you think of these things for him to put into his text message? We've got vaping has only been around since 2003.

This is not enough time to know the true effects of vaping on the body.

As lifestyle diseases take a long time to develop.

There are thousands of unknown chemicals in vapes that could cause damage or disease.

Vapes contain nicotine, which is a highly addictive substance that causes an increase in heart rate and blood pressure.

There is already a link between vaping and COPD and physical injuries from exploding batteries.

I hope that this gives you an understanding of why we don't know enough about vaping in order to say that it is a good thing to use instead of smoking.

In fact, we should avoid both things.

They can both cause harm to ourselves.

Okay, so we finished our learning cycles for today, so let's go through those key points.

Vaping can be used as a nicotine replacement therapy to help a person reduce their smoking.

Vapes contain nicotine, which is a highly addictive substance also found in tobacco products.

Vaping has links with COPD, but the full effect is not yet known.

Scientists continue to carry out their long-term studies into the effects of vaping and will update ideas as new evidence emerges.

Thank you very much for learning with me.

I hope you enjoyed the lesson.

I'll see you again soon.