I'm loathe to introduce pessimistic notes, but I think it's worthwhile taking a realistic look at the likely response of your employers to the various tactics mentioned in this thread.
If you want to swing the opinion of NHS policy with regard to the practice of vaping by employees, you're going to have to play them at their own game. The NHS is committed, by charter, to an evidence-based approach to public health; and in this instance an issue of company policy directly relates to their core concerns so if you can't tackle them on those grounds, you can't tackle them at all. Whether or not vaping is less harmful to you than smoking isn't relevant; the question to address - the only one that matters at this point, in fact - is whether or not there is a non-negligible risk of harm to others due to said activity. In other words, we have a hypothesis to falsify: "Vaping around other people has a statistically significant chance of adversely affecting their health".
Any argument that fails to address that question - i.e. which fails to falsify that hypothesis - fundamentally won't help you.
For instance, (and please don't bite my head off here folks!), the oft-repeated fact that only "food-grade" substances are used in the e-liquids fails this test of relevance. If the substances used had been
banned for use in food because they were harmful, this would tend to
support the hypothesis that second-hand vaping is dangerous, but the converse does not help you to disprove it. Are there substances which are innocuous when ingested but dangerous upon inhalation? Why, yes. Is vaping equivalent to ingestion or inhalation? Why, inhalation. Therefore a substance that is safe to eat may not be safe to vape for you or - and this is the crucial point -
for those around you.
Similarly (and again, my apologies), but this...
Quote
My well-penned reply will include the fact that in the course of our days work, we are expected to inhale nebulised asthma drugs and exhaled Entonox in the MORE confined environment of the back of an ambulance.
...is also not even slightly relevant. Exaggerating the probable risk factors to a ridiculous extreme in order to make a point, the fact that inhaling various aerosols specifically related to your work is 4% likely to kill you, vs. a mere 2% for second-hand vaping IS NOT an argument that vaping should be allowed, no matter how much you might like it to be. Vaping just adds a new risk factor; the two activities are unrelated. Moreover, the former is justifiable in terms of "acceptable risk", given that the entire point of the exposure to inhalers and whatnot is
saving lives, whereas you would be exposing other people to vaping "because you want to". It's an empty argument and will rightly be dismissed as such. If inhaling asthma drugs and whatnot in the ambulance could be demonstrated to be harmful then you might have a case to prompt a safety review and introduce new controls such as breathing filters to reduce your exposure... but it wouldn't make a jot of difference to the case for vaping.
Further complicating this situation is the fact that employers can - and sometimes do - make totally arbitrary decisions about what you can and can't do in the workplace, and this is entirely legal. Taking a commonplace example, how many of us work in places where there is a company dress code? You might be in a position where there is literally no chance whatsoever of a customer ever seeing you, and yet not be allowed to wear jeans. Does your desire to wear jeans give you have any legal recourse to object? No. You might be able to change their minds and you might not, but the only grounds for objection which might be upheld in an employment tribunal are:
1) Other people in similar circumstances at the same company are allowed to wear jeans and you are not
2) The wearing of jeans is in some way important to your religious beliefs AND doesn't harm the company in any way AND doesn't interfere with your ability to do your job. Good luck with that
Given all of this, what you have to remember is that if they want to ban vaping, they don't
need a reason. They just can. They don't have to provide you with a "vaping shelter", because they are not making you vape. They don't
have to provide a smoking shelter either (it is NOT a legal requirement to do so, which I suspect many people forget); and on many NHS sites, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. Your ability to attack them on the basis of flimsy justification will - because they actually don't have to provide a justification at all - likely achieve nothing whatsoever but "make some people a bit cross" unless you can undermine their central point entirely, to the extent where there's an obvious pressure in your favour and none at all in theirs. So, let's return to the arguments that DO make sense.
If all we needed to establish was the relative risk to the primary user of vaping compared to smoking, our job would be - by comparison at least - pretty straightforward. Frankly - if you'll forgive my saying so - we could make great use of this forum to perform a case-control study that was a damn sight better from a methodology point of view than the majority of the "studies" and "trials" performed to date... in fact, I'm increasingly starting to think that we should, but I digress.
What is a great deal more difficult to achieve is establishing solid data as to whether or not vaping is harmful to others. Bear in mind, please, that the bar in that case is much, much lower because now we're not comparing "the harm of vaping" to "the harm of smoking", nor even "the harm of secondary vaping" to "the harm of secondary smoke". No, we're comparing "the harm of secondary vaping" to "the harm of breathing clean air" (or at least, "the air usually found in that workplace environment") and that's a really tough sell.
You won't find any epidemiological studies with respect to second-hand vaping, for all sorts of good and obvious reasons. There simply isn't - and quite likely, will never be - any data to work from, at least not that
directly measures the effect on health from secondary vaping. (Of course, the fact that if it exists it's likely to be a very small effect makes it even harder to study: witness the controversy over the real dangers - or not - of second-hand smoking: and that's with decades of research and zillions of pounds spent [1]). As such, all we can do is measure "soft" outcomes and surrogate end-points, which is where the other approach Neo suggested might bear fruit:
Quote
I will itemise the contents of a vape and want to back up this with published articles.
Now, if I were a different kind of person I'd be posting a primer here on how to use all of the techniques employed by diverse special-interest groups (tobacco, pharma, "nutritionists", homeopathists, cosmetics companies and all other bullshit-peddlers of every stripe) in order to make trial outcomes match exactly the result you want, up to and including massaging the results of trials that seem to say exactly the opposite... That, however, would be wrong: particularly as there's every chance that the outcome we want is in fact the correct one, which is to say "no measurable harm from being in the proximity of a vaper, even long-term".
Measuring what's in the liquid to start with, whilst superficially appearing to be a good starting point, won't give us the information we need. After all, constituents could be changed by heating, by contact with materials in the vaping device (the recent debate over exposed copper coils being one case in point), even by combination with other atmospheric 'contaminants'. Ideally (well, as ideal as it gets without directly measuring harmful health outcomes), we'd measure the actual contents of exhaled vapour, under actual use conditions, in parts per million, in a variety of environments and under a variety of vaping conditions; then we'd compare the measured levels to existing safety data on the substances we've detected. I could spend an hour hammering out a test protocol to do exactly that, but there are probably people here who could do a better job... and anyway, I'm not being paid
You're not going to get hard evidence on the direct health effects of second-hand vapour, but it's entirely possible to figure out
precisely what someone exposed to it is breathing in; and to make a second-order risk assessment on that basis. That's the data you need to be looking for and it's even possible that the necessary expertise for gathering such data - assuming you can't find it elsewhere - exists on this forum. Once you've established the central point that second-hand vaping simply can't introduce any measurable increase in risk to health (and really, it's the
only point that matters for either side, everything else is just waffle),
then and only then can the
improvement to
your own health - and that of other smokers who might vape instead if given the chance - be used as a justification for permitting vaping at work. This is more true of the NHS than anywhere else; their entire goal and mission is that of evidence-based public health interventions, and if you can establish that a change to company policy will effect an overall improvement without increasing the risk of health issues to non-smokers/non-vapers then they're pretty much obliged by their own charter to give the idea full and open consideration.
You can of course introduce other arguments - like increases to productivity and the promotion of safer alternatives to smoking - into the fray once you've covered the key point, but
until you've falsified the "risk to others" hypothesis, much as I hate to say it, you've got nothing.
And to answer Nibby's question: no, you're not the only one. I can vape at work, I just keep it low-key, restrict it to my office, and don't get in the face of anyone who I think might conceivably start a fuss. Least said, soonest mended and all that
____
[1] Although, if less money had been spent on PR exercises from both sides and more on
actual f**king science, we might be in a better position. Ho-hum.
Edited by BigJ, 14 January 2012 - 05:49 PM.
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