Vaping, smoking hookah rises among school students

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delivered a mixed bag of good and bad news on tobacco use among middle and high school students -although adolescents had been smoking fewer cigarettes and cigars in recent years, their use of e-cigarettes and hookahs was rising.

The report, relying on data from National Youth Tobacco Survey, was collected from about 20,000 middle and high school students across the country every year from 2011 to 2015. The 2011 survey was the first year since the survey got underway, that asked about e-cigarettes, which were introduced into the market in the US in 2007.

The instance of e-cigaratte use, at least once in the last month, among high school students, rose from 1.5 per cent in 2011 to 16 per cent in 2015, while the corresponding figure among middle school students was up from 0.6 per cent in 2011 to 5.3 per cent in 2015.

Hookah use also saw an increasing trend from 4.1 per cent to 7.2 per cent among high school students and 1 per cent to 2 per cent among middle school students between 2011 and 2015.

The period recorded a fall in the use of all other tobacco products, including cigarettes, cigars and pipes.

According to experts it was too early to answer the essential question about e-cigarettes - would they lead to more or fewer people to smoke? However, the trend  of smoking among young people had been falling in recent years, and researchers had taken note of that.

''We do not have any strong evidence that it is encouraging smoking among kids but neither do we have good evidence that it won't over time,'' said Kenneth E Warner, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan, The New York Times reported.