At least five Dutch people have nearly died from vaping
At least five Dutch people have nearly died due to vaping. Four had to be placed in an artificial coma for their lungs to recover enough to breathe on their own, according to research by RTL Nieuws.
The five people were admitted to the hospital in critical condition in recent months. According to the broadcaster, they do not know each other and used different brands of vapes with different flavors, all of which are illegal in the Netherlands.
They’re not the only people to need hospital care after using a vape. Sixteen hospitals told RTL that they have admitted multiple patients with serious lung problems linked to vaping, including collapsed lungs, pneumonia, and the lung disease COPD. The patients were mainly young people.
One of the five who nearly died is a teenage girl admitted to the intensive care unit of an academic hospital last year. She was in an artificial coma for weeks while on a heart-lung machine - a device that takes over the function of the heart and lungs outside the patient's body to give these organs a chance to recover. The doctors who treated her told RTL that vaping caused her health problems.
A 28-year-old man was urgently admitted to the hospital in Almelo late last year. He started coughing up large amounts of blood. His condition was so bad that his family rushed to the ICU to say goodbye to him, they told the broadcaster. The man had a breathing tube inserted and was transferred to the more specialised UMC Utrecht, where he was in critical condition on a ventilator for days.
A 17-year-old boy was admitted to the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam with serious breathing problems and was on a lung machine for a week last year. A 19-year-old man and a man in his forties were separately admitted to the ICU in Terneuzen right after each other. Initially, the doctors thought they had double pneumonia. They later diagnosed them with acute interstitial pneumonia caused by vaping. "If they had been admitted a few hours later, they would never have survived," a Terneuzen doctor said.
According to pulmonologist Frank Borm of the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital, it is not clear why these people became so ill while others did not. “What we see is that one person reacts very strongly to a substance in a vape and becomes very ill with lung hemorrhages and massive inflation,” he told the broadcaster. “But the other, who uses the same vape, does not react to it at all. The vape epidemic is, therefore, similar to Covid: one person got a runny nose, the other died. It can happen to anyone.”
Esther Croes of the Trimbos Institute urged parents to talk to their children. “Ask if they vape. Explain this news to them. We must all ensure that no more cases like this occur.”
