Vaping is a health crisis that’s only just begun

Dr. Lynn D’Andrea was standing in a small consultation room on one of the upper floors of the Children’s Wisconsin hospital this past Fourth of July weekend when a younger colleague on the pulmonary team, Dr. Brian J. Carroll, told her she needed to see a teenager who was having severe difficulty breathing. As Carroll later explained, young doctors are trained to deliver a quick, single-sentence synopsis — a “one-liner” — to the attending physicians in the hospital when preparing them for a new consultation. The one-liner in this case began, “Previously healthy teenager coming in with two to three weeks of fever, weight loss, bilateral chest X-ray findings.”To get more news about 2020 Best Vape, you can visit univapo official website.

D’Andrea, who had been on call at the hospital that entire week and holiday weekend, at first believed Carroll had misspoken. “I thought we were mixed up,” she admitted, “and he was telling me the same consult for a second time.”

Beginning the previous Monday, July 1, three adolescents had shown up at the hospital with eerily similar and baffling symptoms: extremely rapid and labored breathing (“Breathing like a gerbil,” in the words of Dr. Michael Meyer, head of the hospital’s pediatric intensive-care unit), weight loss, chest pain, and coughing. Chest X-rays and CT scans were puzzling, too. Instead of a typical picture of pneumonia, in which the signs of infection tend to cloud a particular area on one side of the lungs, these images showed a diffuse “ground glass” pattern on both sides. Even more curious, there was a clean margin — a “sparing” — at the edges of the lungs in the CT images. That wasn’t typical of pneumonia but more like some kind of environmental exposure.

“I think the one-liner was the exact same for three patients in a row,” Carroll said. “That starts to raise some eyebrows.” Whatever caused their illnesses wasn’t sudden. They had all been sick for a couple of weeks before something tipped them over into severe respiratory distress, breathing 40 or 50 times a minute. “That rate for a teenager is very close to impending respiratory failure,” said Meyer.

Epidemiologists call this a “cluster,” a burst of cases occurring together in time and place. It may have been a coincidence that most of the first patients came from the same suburban area west of Milwaukee, according to D’Andrea, but this led the doctors to seek a common factor. And that’s when the rest of Carroll’s one-liner began to seem more than incidental: “And they’re all reporting a history of significant vaping.”

In gathering case histories from adolescents, doctors deliberately ask them about drugs, sex, smoking, and other social habits when their parents are out of the room. In this case, D’Andrea and Meyer didn’t need to worry. “Those kids were telling me everything,” D’Andrea said. “They were scared.” Prior to feeling ill, they told the doctors, they had all been using e-cigarette devices and vaping products containing THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.

“We felt like we were being sucked into this detective role,” D’Andrea told me. “They had all come from sort of the same area, and they were trying to tell us where they got these products from, and we were trying to figure out if these were commercial or repackaged products. And it all got — it got too much.” By the end of the weekend, D’Andrea said, she felt “we need to let someone know. Someone is hurting our kids.”