Experts to pregnant women: e-cigarettes are more dangerous to babies than tobacco smoke

Women who switch to e-cigarettes when pregnant may be unwittingly damaging their unborn baby, scientists have warned. The devices harm learning, memory, co-ordination and behavior, it is feared. Even fertility may be cut, the world’s leading science conference has heard. The researchers, who were shocked by their results, said that women who smoke often switch to e-cigarettes when pregnant, in the misguided belief they are safer than tobacco.
Professor Judith Zelikoff, of New York University, said: ‘Women may be turning to these products as an alternative because they think they’re safe. Well, they’re not.’
The professor’s research adds to a growing concern about the safety of electronic cigarettes.
Used by an estimated 2.6million Britons, they vaporise nicotine to provide a smoker’s high without exposure to the tar and other cancerous chemicals found in cigarettes.
Recent studies have linked them to everything from cancer to disabling lung damage.
However, with health officials declaring them safe enough for use in pregnancy and giving the go-ahead to prescribe on them on the NHS, many people believe them to harmless.
Professor Zelikoff compared baby mice exposed to e-cigarette vapour in the womb and shortly after birth with pups whose mothers had breathed in clean air. Both normal e-cigarettes and nicotine-free varieties were used. When she looked at the creatures’ brains, she found distinct differences in their genes, with up to 2,630 genes more or less active in the mice that had breathed in e-cigarette fumes.
Females were more affected than males and nicotine-free e-cigarettes caused the biggest changes, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference heard. In another experiment, the professor linked e-cigarette exposure in the womb to cuts in male fertility. Pups who breathed in the vapour made half as much sperm as normal and those they did make struggled to swim.
The professor said: ‘We were very surprised. We didn’t expect to see such a dramatic effect.’
Describing her results as ‘ground-breaking’, the researcher said that the safety of e-cigarettes has been under-researched.
Professor Zelikoff said: ‘We have to make people more aware of the risks. The major point is that these e-cigarettes need more safety testing. ‘The perception is that e-cigarettes are completely safe for pregnant women and vulnerable groups like infants, but we can’t say that.
 ‘For women who are pregnant, this could be dangerous. They could be unwittingly endangering their child.”
Last year, Public Health England said at least 76,000 lives could be saved annually if smokers went electronic. But it later emerged that the claim relied on a study partially conducted by scientists with links to the e-cigarette industry.
The devices are banned from some public areas, including railways stations, and have caused bomb alerts on buses, leading to motorway closures.
Professor Adam Balen, chairman of the British Fertility Society, said: ‘Whilst e-cigarettes may help some people to stop smoking real cigarettes, one cannot escape the reality that various chemicals are still being inhaled that have potentially harmful effects both to health, fertility and also the non-consenting participant, the baby.

Source: DailyMail