United States: The last recorded government survey of school children, from a national sample of sixty thousand kids, most in high school, found that they left e-cigarettes in 2024.
According to a team of specialists coming from the US Centers for Disease Control, vaping decline from 10 to 7.8 percent among high school students this year is “the lowest level ever recorded in the National Youth Tobacco Survey, US News reported.
Extraordinary milestone is achieved
Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, said, “Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health. However, with more than 2 million youth using tobacco products and certain groups not experiencing declines in use, our mission is far from complete.”
Other kinds of tobacco use are also very low; traditional cigarette use only stands at a mere 1.4 percent of the middle and high school kids smoke, as shown in the conducted report.
The only bit of bad news
One of the newer tobacco products is nicotine-containing tobacco pouches, which are placed between the cheek and gum; these products have grown slowly but steadily popular among teenagers.
At present, they are the second most used tobacco product among students, where 2.4 percent of high school students often use pouches.
As the CDC investigator Ahmed Jamal noted, “Nicotine pouch sales have substantially increased nationwide since 2016,” and “nearly one million (890,000) students reported ever using nicotine pouches in 2024,” as US News reported.
However, the general tendencies were upward, with one study indicating that, by 2024, only one in ten middle and high school students would be using any of the tobacco products.
The team of Jamal also believes these declines are a result of persisting activation awareness campaigns at national, state, and local levels to educate the effect of vaping and smoking among kids.
The findings were published in the CDC’s ‘Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report’ on October 17, 2014.
Still remains worrisome tendencies
However, one must not forget that the tobacco industry is hardly ever out of the fight, and there are still some emerging trends that make a lot of sense.
They pointed out that flavored [vape] products attract youths, notably the return to the market and available marketing the harm, misconception [and] other novel flavor types, for instance, cooling, fruity “ice’ revert children back to the vice, hooked on vaping once more.
According to Brian King, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, “We’re headed in the right direction when it comes to reducing tobacco product use among our nation’s youth,” US News reported.
“But we can’t take our foot off the gas. Continued vigilance is needed to continue to reduce all forms of tobacco product use among youth. Addressing disparities remains an essential part of these efforts to ensure that we don’t leave anyone behind,” King added.