Maddie DeBiase & Sarah Casey

Staff Writers

The vaping epidemic has reportedly led to at least 1,300 teens being hospitalized across 49 US states and the US Virgin Islands, according to an article by the Washington Post. Teens are not only being hospitalized but they’re dying. Twenty-One teens and one adult have already been pronounced dead due to a lung illness connected to vaping.
History teacher, Ms. Jesscia Hirshbeck believes the trends are startling.
“I’m really surprised about the amount of teens vaping,” she says.
Kids are addicted to nicotine and for this reason, not stopping their vaping.
A junior at Foran High School said, “It is hard for us to just stop out of nowhere when we had been vaping for years now.”
An anonymous senior at Foran High School explains, “It makes everyone feel good and it’s cool. We can’t make kids stop.”
Students here know their classmates are vaping.
The Latin teacher, Mrs. Wendy Valleau, at Foran says, “If anyone was listening to the news, have you heard the latest, five deaths now, countless lung infections and the CDC and the American Medical Association is telling people to stop, this very minute, because there are so many dangers and things happening.”
Many students seem unaware of the tragic events happening due to vaping. Ms. Sarah DiGiacomo, a history teacher, believes to stop teens from vaping, “We need to educate them about the medical issues to scare them.”
Also, Hirshbeck says, “Some ways we can get teens to stop is to educate them on the dangers of vaping. When I was younger and my parents were younger, we didn’t know a lot about the dangers of smoking cigarettes and now you don’t see many people smoking cigarettes at all because the dangers have been studied and researched. And as news articles and studies come out on the dangers of vaping and the long term effects, I think students will curb their use.”
As some people already know, cigarettes were advertised as healthy at first, but soon after that people were starting to be harmed by them. This caused the number of people smoking cigarettes to drop.
This is the same with vaping. Vaping was being shown as a safe alternative to smoking, but now people are starting to have very serious health problems and it’s even leading to deaths. Though, in a way vaping is different from cigarettes. Vaping is killing people instantly, unlike cigarettes where people develop these health conditions over time. Therefore, some health officials believe vaping is even worse than cigarettes.
School nurse, Linda Bespuda at Foran High School stated, “There is a lot we don’t know about it, and I think it is more dangerous than we originally thought.”
Bespuda also explains, there is a vaping program through the American Lung Association. The statistics are continuing to rise as more deaths are occurring across more states.