“E-cigarettes are new and we certainly don’t yet have all the answers as to their long-term health impact, but what we do know is that they are much safer than cigarettes, which kill over 6 million people a year worldwide,” according to Ann McNeill, deputy director of the U.K. Centre for Tobacco & Alcohol Studies.
This quote appears in a WebMD article by Peter Russell which discusses the criticism of the World Health Organization (WHO) report on electronic cigarettes. The result of that report is a call for a ban on electronic cigarettes in public places and workplaces. McNeill describes the report as surprisingly negative and “found it misleading and not an accurate reflection of available evidence.”
While electronic cigarettes obviously do not fit in with the WHO’s political agenda, they apparently do fit in quite nicely with those groups that are actually concerned about saving smokers’ lives.