A 6-year-old girl was poisoned when her father mistook nicotine-containing e-cigarette liquid for pain medicine, according to a case study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine and reported by the Washington Post.
Medical experts warn that incidents like these illustrate the deadly dangers children face as e-cigarettes — and liquid nicotine — become increasingly popular.
“Generally, it has become more common, and our concern is that it will continue to do so because there is a greater availability of more highly concentrated nicotine products,” Matt Noble, a medical toxicology fellow with the Oregon Poison Center and instructor at the Department of Emergency Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, said in an interview.
Noble, who co-authored the case report, said that although children in the past may have chewed on cigarettes or gotten into their parents’ nicotine patches, the amount of nicotine in those products was “relatively low.”
With liquid nicotine, however, “the potential for toxicity is relatively unprecedented,” he said, noting that it not only comes in high volumes but also is highly concentrated.
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