Magistrale 1
- Assignment 1
Submission date: Friday 25th October. Assignments will NOT
be accepted after this date.
Viewpoint: are e-cigarettes really a
menace?
E-cigarettes,
devices that give you a nicotine-hit by heating up a liquid which you then
inhale, have become (1) all the rage. But is the concern about them
justified, asks Michael Mosley.
A few years
ago they were a rarity, but (2) now there are nearly three
million e-cigarettes out there. Many people think that they are
as bad for you as normal cigarettes. But are they? I've recently spent a couple
of months making a documentary about e-cigarettes, trying to find out truth
behind the headlines. I took up heavy vaping (that's what you do when you
inhale vapour from an e-cigarettes). I have never smoked anything before and I
wanted to see what effects inhaling nicotine in the form of an e-cig would have
on a non-smoker. The results surprised me.
(3)
Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you and can lead to lung cancer. It also increases your risk of
dying from a range of other conditions including heart attack, stroke and
dementia. If you're a man you might like to know (but then again you might not)
that smoking is one of the main causes of impotence.
Fans of
e-cigarettes say vaping can reduce the burden of smoking either by making it
easier for smokers to quit or by providing them with a safer way for them to
get a nicotine hit. (4) Critics, however, say that we are gambling with
a technology we don't understand and that there is no convincing
evidence that e-cigarettes help people quit smoking. It may even encourage
non-smokers to start.
(5)Some
countries have warily embraced e-cigarettes, while others have effectively banned them. The
UK has so far adopted a liberal approach, but on Friday new European
legislation will come into force which will limit the size of refills and the
nicotine content of the fluids. Vaping will become more restricted. So, who's
right? Are e-cigarettes one of the greatest public health measures ever
invented, with the potential to save millions of lives, or (6) are
they just another cunning way to keep us hooked on nicotine? I was
keen to find out. The scientific consensus is that vaping, at least in the
short term, is a lot safer than conventional smoking. A recent study for Public
Health England concluded that e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than normal
cigarettes.
To be
honest when I took up vaping I wasn't that worried about the short term health
effects. What I was far more concerned about was getting hooked on nicotine.
Yet as the weeks went by and I puffed away, nothing happened. When I leapt out
of bed I didn't feel a longing to reach for my machine. If anything (7) I
found it a bit of a chore. Chatting to experts I discovered, to my
considerable surprise, that although cigarettes are highly addictive, nicotine
alone may not be. Although no-one knows for sure, research in animals suggests
that nicotine is far more addictive when delivered in combination with the
other chemicals found in regular cigarettes. And nicotine in its pure form may
have an upside. There's evidence it can help patients with Alzheimer's and
Parkinson's disease.
The
National Institute on Aging in the US has recently funded a trial of 300
patients with mild cognitive impairment (a precursor to Alzheimer's). The
patients, none of whom are smokers, will be randomly allocated to either
nicotine patches or placebo patches. Over the next few years they will have
regular health checks, as well as memory and cognition tests. A similar,
smaller study, published in 2012, found that non-smokers given nicotine patches
saw improvements in memory, attention and reaction times.
But before
you start slapping on the patches or firing up an e-cig you should be aware
that though nicotine may help people who already have impaired memory, there's
no evidence it will help the rest of us. Although I was tested
before and after doing a month of heavy vaping, the nicotine didn't enhance my
brain, apart from a small improvement in my fine motor skills.
But the
main health justification for e-cigarettes is that they can help those who are
keen to quit smoking tobacco, quit. So do they? There have been very few
randomised controlled trials, but the ones that have been done suggest it
does. When (8) Horizon conducted a small study randomly
allocating a group of hardcore smokers to either e-cigs, nicotine patches or
simply giving up (going cold turkey), we found the vapers and those
who slapped on the patches were far more successful at abandoning their
cigarettes. E-cigs are not risk free and after a month of heavy vaping there
were signs of increased inflammation in my lungs (which rapidly reversed when I
stopped). Nonetheless I think that for smokers (9) e-cigarettes could
prove to be a game changer.
There is a
huge amount at stake. A billion people worldwide spend around £500bn a year on
cigarettes and around half of them will die of smoking related diseases. In the
UK alone smoking kills around 100,000 a year.(10) Anything which gets
people off cigarettes is going to save a lot of lives.
Source:
Michael
Mosley, BBC News Magazine http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine
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PARAPHRASE
Re-state clearly and concisely the ideas expressed in the 10
underlined phrases bring sure to reference the subject of the sentence if a
pronoun is used. You may need to reformulate the whole sentence as well as
change word class to do this effectively. You do not need to find synonyms
for: e-cigarettes and vaping.
SUMMARY
Using your own words write a
clear, concise summary of the main idea and key points raised in this article
remembering to attribute sources of information. You are advised to write a
first draft and then work on that to produce a good copy. You should write
between 140-160 words. You will be penalized if you write more.
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