An alarming number of children under four years old were accidentally poisoned by vaping products last year, as a health expert warns they are being mistaken for dummies.
The NSW Poisons Information Centre received 213 calls regarding this age group's exposure to e-cigarettes and liquids in 2022, compared with 127 the previous year.
Genevieve Adamo, the centre's senior specialist in poisons information, said toddlers were stumbling upon the products and putting them in their mouths, "as children do".
"They say, 'oh the kid has picked it up and put it in their mouth like a dummy'," she said.
In one year it became almost twice as common for children in this age group to suffer injury from vaping, compared with a similar number of incidents from more common household items.
Ms Adamo said it was particularly alarming given it had become as prevalent as accidental poisoning from everyday products such as fly spray and zinc oxide, found in nappy rash creams.
Overall the centre received 365 calls in 2022, compared with 284, and said it had steadily been increasing over five years.
That means 58 per cent of the total number of calls related to children under the age of four.
Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, coughing fits, an increased heart rate, loss of consciousness, and in some cases, seizures.
Matthew Peters, professor of respiratory medicine at Macquarie University Hospital, said the high price of more than $100 for vapes in 2019 was a barrier for teenagers.
But the advent of cheap, disposable products "changed everything".
What are vapes doing to lungs?
Mr Peters said the lung was purposely designed to breathe in clean air and extract pure oxygen.
"It's not purpose designed to be coated with a range of chemicals with an uncertain effect," he said.
Vaping partially paralyses the normal host immune response of lungs, Mr Peters said.
And it sets up an inflammatory process using pathways that are both similar and different to smoking cigarettes.
Simon Chapman, emeritus professor of public health at Sydney University, has a decades-long career in tobacco control.
He said it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out why vaping was so popular among young people.
Mr Chapman asked his 12-year-old granddaughter if kids in her final year of primary school were vaping, and she responded they were.
"And I said, 'what's it all about?' You know, 'why are they doing it?"
'"And she said to me, 'well you can get lemonade,' you know, excitedly."
Mr Chapman said it wasn't strange nobody had died from vaping after only about ten years of usage.
"When someone is exposed to asbestos, they don't die that day, that week, that month, that year, in the next 10 years, they die 40 or 50 years later, from really horrible lung diseases," he said.
"It could be a whole different profile of respiratory or cardiovascular-type problems.
"One of the other big differences is that a person who smokes inhales tobacco smoke, on average around about 100 times a day.
"Whereas a person who vapes every day is inhaling vape about 500 times a day."
"There's no kind of precedent for anything like this."
High levels of nicotine increases addiction
Mr Peters said the amount of nicotine teenagers were vaping was taking away their option of easily quitting.
"If you're a 14- year-old, the capacity to smoke seven or eight cigarettes a day is almost zero", he said, adding this frequency rate created a solid nicotine addiction.
"On the other hand, that's really easy to do if you're vaping."
A typical double-barrelled device on the street contains the equivalent nicotine to about 10-12 packets of cigarettes.
E-cigarettes are also easily concealable from teachers and parents.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration this month finished taking submissions on potential reforms to government regulation and legislation.
Mr Peters said there were about 4,000 submissions received, and depending on the results, may prompt the federal government to further regulate the industry as soon as this year.
It is currently illegal for vaping products containing nicotine to be sold in NSW without a prescription. The maximum penalty is fine of $1,650, or six months in prison, or both.
