Sept. 14, 2019
Hello friend! Welcome to Scrap Facts.
I'm a reporter covering health and science with insatiable curiosity. I love everything I learn, not all of which gets its own story. Each week, I'll bring you some of my favorite facts that I picked up on the job or while out living life.
Archives from Tinyletter can be found here.
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ve probably noticed that Quartz installed a paywall. If you’d like to get around that paywall or get exclusive access to membership stories (some of which are featured below), you can become a member by signing up here. For half off, you can use the promo code “KFOLEY3089”.
Vaping is the sequel to cigarettes. And if history has taught us anything, it’s gonna be a long franchise.
No one, not even me, can ignore vaping anymore.
In the past couple of months, at least 450 people have gotten seriously ill from what seems to be an acute vape-related lung disease, which has killed six people. The only thing these patients have in common is that they had all recently reported vaping.
Because vaping is so new (it really kicked off in the mid-2000s in the US), there hasn’t been enough data for scientists to say whether it’s definitively safe or not. Early data suggests that maybe e-cigarettes are better than other nicotine replacement therapies to quit smoking. But there’s also major concerns that teens who have never smoked cigarettes are picking up vaping at alarming rates. And now, after these reported illnesses and deaths, a lot of people are worried about its short-term and long-term safety.
Even President Trump bothered to read the news about it. This week he and officials from the US Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration announced that they were planning to ban all flavored e-cigarettes from the market. The thinking is that by banning the flavors that draw in minors the most, they’ll be able to curb youth smoking rates.
I have a couple of concerns about that, though.
First, the FDA has threatened to crack down on vaping before. Last year they gave Juul, one of the leaders of the e-cigarette market, 60 days to figure out how to limit teen use of their product. There were so many rumors floating around that the FDA was going to ban Juul’s flavored cartridges, the company voluntarily stopped selling them. Ultimately, the FDA tackled flavored cigars and menthol cigarettes instead, and Juul quietly put its flavored cartridges back on the market. In other words: I’ll believe it when I see it.
But more importantly, any time in history the US federal government has tried to ban a certain behavior (think alcohol during prohibition, marijuana, and even sex work), people have still found a way to do it. Without the government’s blessing (read: regulation), these practices have only become more dangerous for the people who engage in them.
Banning flavored e-cigarettes would mean that only legit sellers would halt their sales. But that doesn’t mean people would stop smoking them. They’d just get them from more dubious sources. One of the troubles with vapes—including most of the ones that have been tied to these acute lung illnesses—is that there is already a huge black market of unregulated products that may contain unsafe chemicals.
For example, right now, marijuana is still a schedule 1 drug, which means the FDA doesn’t regulate any weed products. Several of the people who have gotten sick after vaping were smoking THC cartridges with questionable, unregulated chemicals.
Banning flavored e-cigs may stop some teens from vaping, but I worry that it’d harm a lot of other people for this reason. A product ban means scientists, who are performing a public health service, can’t (or won’t) do their jobs to assess flavored vapes’ potential dangers. Sure, vaping is already an epidemiological nightmare to research because there’s so much variety on the market. But that’s not an excuse to not try studying it.
Wanna learn more about vaping? On Monday I wrote this handy guide to answer the question: Is it safe to vape? I also wrote a longer story specifically about how the history of smoking can inform the future of vaping, and just how hard it will be to study. (You should read that second one. It’s really good. I’m proud of it.)
You can also hear me talk about the FDA’s decision to crack down on Juul’s marketing with the BBC here.
Bonus fact: Vaping is a bit of a misnomer, my colleague Jenni Avins points out in this overview of the field—you’re actually smoking aerosolized particles of liquid suspended in air, not a true gaseous form of anything.
In 18th century Europe, the number one way to revive a drowned victim was to blow smoke up his butt.
Found while reporting: Can a vaping health crisis be avoided?
One of the reasons tobacco has stuck around for such a long time is that nicotine is fun. It’s no surprise that people have been smoking it in some iteration for thousands of years. It’s also no surprise that, like alcohol, researchers have spent lifetimes trying to figure out ways that it could maybe be useful.
Tobacco is actually one of those things that European conquerors brought over from their escapades in the Americas. By the 18th century, it was common for tobacco to be used for medicinal purposes. According to Sawbones, my go-to listening for all things medical history, tobacco-smoke enemas were one of the most popular ways to try to revive drowning victims.
It’s true! Per Gizmodo, this practice was so common in the 1700s in England there were actually bellows, tubes, and fumigators lining the River Thames. It’s also where the phrase, “blow smoke up your ass” comes from—although today, that often refers to disingenuously complimenting someone.
It sounds like a bonkers theory, but in fact there was some logic to it. By that point in history, people knew nicotine from tobacco was a stimulant. The idea was that maybe, nicotine could startle a stopped heart. (There was also some thinking that the smoke would dry out any excess water from the drowning. This was wishful thinking.)
In the early 1800s, researchers noticed that nicotine harmed the hearts of animals who were exposed to it. Still, tobacco remained a part of medicine throughout the century, explained in this box from this paper, published by Anne Charlton, a former professor of medicine at the University of Manchester:
Charlton also notes that, even in the 1900s, an ointment made from tobacco was used as a cure for wounds and infections like ringworm (which is not, in fact, a worm). Perplexingly, she even managed to find a meta-review published in the late 1990s (as in, only two decades ago!) that found that smoking may have lowered risks for Alzheimer’s disease—the idea was maybe, nicotine as a stimulant was somehow protective for the brain.
At this point, though, we know that the cardiovascular risks of smoking are deleterious to the brain as well. Try as scientists did for literal centuries, they simply haven’t been able to find a good reason for why anyone should smoke other than the immediate pleasure of it.
Bonus fact: Friend of the newsletter Chris from Los Angeles informed me this week that Mel Blanc, one of the most prolific voice actors who was one of the voices behind several Looney Tunes characters (think Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Pepé Le Pew), picked up smoking at age 9. He continued a pack-a-day habit until his late 70s, when he was diagnosed with emphysema. He died of coronary artery disease at 81.
The person who discovered Alzheimer’s backed one of the diseases’ most controversial theories today—no one believed him them, either.
Found while reporting this obsession email on Alzheimer’s:
As I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before, we’ve known about Alzheimer’s for over a century, thanks to the work of a German neuropathologist and psychiatrist named Alois Alzheimer. He was the first to note, just about 113 years ago, that cases of “presenile dementia” were the result of buildups of amyloid plaques and taus in the brain.
He discovered this while examining the brain of a woman who died at 50 (young by even the disease’s standards) after suffering for five years from dementia and troubled sleep (another characteristic of the disease).
Heart-breakingly, when he first presented the work at a big psychiatry conference, the head of the meeting, a psychiatrist named Alfred Hoche, completely dismissed him. Hoche either didn’t like the case report or didn’t care, and ushered on the next speaker after Alzheimer without allowing the audience to ask questions. Rude! But also: Hoche was a big proponent of eugenics and euthanasia for “lives that are no longer worthy.” The Nazis loved his work. So he was a bad guy for much bigger reasons.
Anyway, no one believed Alzheimer at the time—especially when he proposed that infectious agents were to blame. At the time, neuroimaging wasn’t good enough to recognize that the plaques and tangles were proteins, and not viruses themselves. It wasn’t until the amyloid-beta protein was discovered in 1984 that the infectious theory was abandoned. As I’ve reported here before, though, it’s making a comeback.
Some exciting news: I’m one of 14 reporters selected to be part of this year’s Journalists in Aging Fellows Program. This fellowship is supported by the Gerontological Society of America and Journalists Network on Generations, and they’ll be supporting some of my upcoming reporting on aging research and diversity in clinical trials.
Animal of the week: Elephant shrews
Like us, other primates, and a handful of bats, elephant shrews (which are actually some 20 species) menstruate regularly. They are mammals more closely related to elephants than shrews (the resemblance is uncanny) and they live in the forests of East Africa.
Stuff I learned from others:
The Loch Ness Monster is probably several giant eels. Champagne corks have more pressure behind them than car tires (watch your eyes!). Groupon is offering patients deals on medical services. Protesters in Hong Kong are adopting anti-surveillance fashion (and it’s really pretty cool looking.) Ghost crabs have terrifyingly rumbly tummies. Bee semen is even more horrifying than ghost crabs’ tummies. Tourism from China is so big, it’s changing global travel. The real-life Kool-Aid man would weigh 11,000 pounds.
That’s all for now. Stay curious, friend! <3
If you love Scrap Facts, consider hitting the “like” button at the bottom of this page, or sending it to a friend. You can also send your own scrap facts to scrapfacts@gmail.com to be featured in future editions. Wanna keep in touch outside of this newsletter? Follow me on Twitter and Instagram.
Top image by E. Y. Smith, headshot drawing by Richard Howard.