Surging numbers of children using e-cigarettes, UN health agency says

The World Health Organisation says at least 15 million children aged 13 to 15 are vaping. Photo / Getty Images

E-cigarettes are fuelling an “alarming” new wave of nicotine addiction, with millions of children now hooked on vaping, the World Health Organisation warned today.

In countries that have the data, children are on average nine times more likely than adults to vape, the WHO said.

The UN health agency said the industry was promoting vapes as supposedly less harmful products than cigarettes - but in fact was aggressively targeting young people and getting children addicted.

More than 100 million people are vaping, according to the WHO’s first global estimate of e-cigarette use.

They include at least 86 million adults, mostly in high-income countries - and at least 15 million children aged 13 to 15.

“E-cigarettes are fuelling a new wave of nicotine addiction,” Etienne Krug, the WHO’s director of health determinants, promotion and prevention, said in a statement.

“They are marketed as harm reduction but, in reality, are hooking kids on nicotine earlier and risk undermining decades of progress.”

Global figures down

Globally, people are smoking less, with the number of tobacco users dropping from 1.38 billion in 2000 to 1.2 billion in 2024, while the world’s population has swelled.

However, one in five adults worldwide are still addicted to tobacco.

“Millions of people are stopping, or not taking up, tobacco use thanks to tobacco control efforts,” WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in the statement.

In response, the tobacco industry “is fighting back with new nicotine products, aggressively targeting young people”, Tedros added.

Twelve countries are seeing tobacco use rising, the WHO said in its global report on trends in tobacco use prevalence.

“These reversals ... represent millions more people at risk of disease, disability and premature death,” said WHO’s assistant director-general Jeremy Farrar.

Worldwide, smoking reduction is happening more quickly among women than men.

‘Subtle’ online ads

Farrar said tobacco use was killing more than seven million people every year, while second-hand smoke killed over one million.

Smoking damages “every single part of the body”, Farrar told reporters, adding that doing it indoors around children was “irresponsible and unacceptable”.

Around 40 million children aged 13 to 15 currently use tobacco, or one in 10, said Farrar.

In some countries, children were “well under 10” when they started using tobacco, said Alison Commar, the global report’s lead author.

Commar warned children were being “very heavily exposed” to tobacco advertising online.

“It’s really subtle. It’s very difficult to regulate,” she said, with social media influencers using products while discussing something else.

She told reporters that e-cigarettes were “very much a gateway for young people to move later into tobacco, or to maintain a nicotine addiction as they grow older”.

-Agence France-Presse