E-cigarettes: Primary school age children are ending up in hospital due to excessive vaping
Boys and girls of primary school age are becoming so ill from vaping they are ending up in hospital, a Sky News investigation can reveal.
Figures from NHS England show there were 15 cases where children aged nine or under needed to be admitted in the year to April, up from 12 last year and two the year before that.
Professor Andy Bush, a paediatric chest physician at the Royal Brompton Hospital in west London, says he’s “absolutely horrified” by the statistics.
“Young children are being exposed to substances of addiction, substances that are toxic and some of the toxicity is not known,” he said.
“It’s a jungle… we just do not know what is in most of these things.
“If a teenager starts smoking cigarettes, probably the worst that’s going to happen to them is they’re going to be sick and throw up behind the bike shed.
“The acute use of e-cigarettes can put them in hospital, can put them in intensive care, things like lung bleeding, lung collapse and air leak, the lungs filling up with fat.”
For many smokers, vaping has been the key to quitting what is the biggest preventable cause of death.
Rosey Christoffersen died after both her lungs collapsed
But Rachel Howe is convinced it’s what killed her 18-year-old daughter, Rosey Christoffersen in February 2015, six months after she began vaping heavily.
“She was supposed to call me at 5.30pm but she didn’t call,” she said.
“I rang her phone and one of the ambulance crew answered and said we’re with your daughter, we’re working on her. She’d come out of work and collapsed.”
Rosey had suffered a heart attack, but what had caused it was the sudden collapse of both her lungs – a bilateral pneumothorax.
Her brain was starved of oxygen and two days later it was made clear she would not survive.
Rachel Howe is convinced vaping killed her daughter
Rachel, from the Wirral, was told Rosey’s lungs were “just a mass of holes and blisters called blebs”.
“To be honest, there was just a lot of stunned silence at the hospital,” she said.
Rosey had been to the doctors a number of times with chest pain in the months before her death but as a fit and active footballer it was put down to a pulled muscle.
“I was finding bottles and bottles of the empty liquid,” said Rachel.
“She constantly had it in her mouth. And I kept saying to her, you know, you wouldn’t smoke that much… why are you vaping that much?”
No post-mortem was carried out, no official link was made, but Rachel says doctors told her vaping was “probably” to blame.
Professor Andy Bush
Professor Bush goes further than that, adding he has never seen double lung collapse in a fit, young person.
“I think that mother is right,” he said.
“I cannot think of any other explanation that would cover the facts.”
It’s illegal to sell vapes to under-18s and the boxes are clearly labelled.
But it’s easy to see why certain products would appeal to children.
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They’re brightly coloured, flavoured like fruit or sweets, and at around £5 each for a disposable vape, cheap.
Some look like make-up, others like pens.
Rosey had been to the doctors a number of times with chest pain but as an active footballer it was put down to a pulled muscle
The government recently announced it would be clamping down on rogue firms unlawfully targeting teens with advertising on platforms like TikTok.
“Illicit vape enforcement squads” are also being set up at a cost of £3m to uncover the traders selling to young people.
In total, 40 young people aged up to 19 were admitted to hospital in the past year from vaping.
Read more:
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What are the dangers of vaping?
But John Dunne, from the UK Vaping Industry Association, says “the statistics would not exist if children were not getting their hands on vapes”.
“Every year according to the NHS some 76,000 people die from smoking, whereas there has not been one officially confirmed report of a death from vaping even though the category has been available in the UK for around the last 15 years,” he said.
“The fundamental issue that needs urgently addressing is the woeful level of enforcement of vaping age regulations across the UK.
“Whilst we see recent measures announced by the government as a step in the right direction to tackle youth vaping… much more needs to be done to support Trading Standards in their efforts to tackle rogue traders and cut off the source of supply of vapes to minors.”
He wants on-the-spot fines of £10,000 to be introduced for those caught selling to young people.
Rachel Howe and Rosey Christoffersen
Rosey was due to start a new job as a trainee hairdresser a couple of days after collapsing.
Instead that day she was being kept alive so her organs could be donated, helping eight other people.
Rachel wants more research to be done into the impact vaping has on young people.
She’s made it her mission to tell her daughter’s story to any young people she sees vaping, or who come into the shop she works in asking for them.
The impact on young lungs is only just emerging, but she knows there’s too much at stake to ignore the risks.
MP Mike Amesbury has pleaded guilty to assault by beating for punching a man in Cheshire.
The Runcorn and Helsby MP appeared at Chester Magistrates’ Court on Thursday morning where he admitted attacking 45-year-old Paul Fellows in Main Street, Frodsham, Cheshire, in October.
Speaking outside the court, he said the incident was “highly regrettable” and he was “sincerely sorry” to Mr Fellows and his family.
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CCTV footage showed Amesbury, who has been an MP since 2017, punching Mr Fellows on the ground.
Other previously released videos from another angle show Amesbury punching Mr Fellows repeatedly after knocking him to the floor as members of the public intervened.
It was reported to police at 2.48pm on Saturday 26 October.
The court heard how Amesbury told Mr Fellows “you won’t threaten your MP again” after punching him in the head with enough force to knock him to the ground.
The 55-year-old politician is currently an independent MP after he was suspended by Labour at the end of October when the CCTV footage emerged.
He will continue to be suspended so remains as an independent.
Pic: Richard Townshend/UK Parliament/PA
The court heard Mr Fellows recognised Amesbury in the taxi rank in Frodsham town centre at about 2am on 26 October last year.
Both were alone and had been drinking.
Alison Storey, prosecuting, said Mr Fellows approached the MP to remonstrate about a bridge closure in the town and CCTV then shows they spoke for several minutes but there was no aggression or raised voices.
Mr Fellows then started to walk away but Amesbury re-engaged and was heard saying “what” a few times before shouting it.
The victim then put his hands in his pockets and turned towards the taxi queue and when he turned back Amesbury punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground.
He then punched Mr Fellows again, at least five times, Ms Storey said.
She told the court he was then heard saying “you won’t threaten your MP again will you”.
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Amesbury was voluntarily interviewed under caution by Cheshire Police in October and was charged with common assault on 7 November.
At the time, Amesbury said what happened was “deeply regrettable” and he was co-operating with police.
A Labour Party spokesman said: “It is right that Mike Amesbury has taken responsibility for his unacceptable actions.
“He was rightly suspended by the Labour Party following the announcement of the police investigation.
“We cannot comment further whilst legal proceedings are still ongoing.”
Amesbury is set to be sentenced next month. If he is sent to prison or given a suspended sentence he could lose his seat.
A sentence of less than a year, even if it is suspended, would leave him liable to the recall process, which would trigger a by-election if 10% of registered voters in his seat sign a petition calling for it.
A jail term of more than a year would mean he automatically loses his seat.
UK
‘I have nightmares of dead bodies’: Patients dying and undiscovered for hours in hospital corridors
Patients are dying in corridors and going undiscovered for hours while the sick are left to soil themselves, nurses have said, revealing the scale of the corridor crisis inside the UK’s hospitals.
In a “harrowing” report built from the experiences of more than 5,000 NHS nursing staff, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) found almost seven in 10 (66.81%) say they are delivering care in overcrowded or unsuitable places, including converted cupboards, corridors and even car parks, on a daily basis.
Demoralised staff are looking after as many as 40 patients in a single corridor, unable to access oxygen, cardiac monitors, suction and other lifesaving equipment.
Women are miscarrying in corridors, while some nurses report being unable to carry out adequate CPR on patients having heart attacks.
Sara (not her real name) said she was on shift when a doctor told her there was a dying patient who had been waiting in the hospital’s corridor for six hours.
“It took a further two hours to get her into an adequate care space to make her clean and comfortable,” she told Sky News.
“That’s a human being, someone in the last hours of their life in the middle of a corridor with a detoxing patient vomiting and being abusive behind them and a very poorly patient in front of them, who was confused, screaming in pain. It was awful on the family, and it was awful on the patient.”
Dead patients ‘not found for hours’
A nurse working in the southeast of England quit her job after witnessing an elderly lady in “animal-like conditions”.
She told the RCN: “A 90-year-old lady with dementia was scared, crying and urinating in the bed after asking several times for help to the toilet. Seeing that lady, frightened and subjected to animal-like conditions is what broke me.
“At the end of that shift, I handed in my notice with no job to go to. I will not work where this is a normal day-to-day occurrence.”
Another nurse in the South East said a patient died in a corridor and “wasn’t discovered for hours”.
Sara told Sky another woman needed resuscitating after the oxygen underneath her trolley ran out. Sara was one of just two nurses caring for more than 30 patients on that corridor.
“I have had nightmares – I have a nightmare that I walk out in the corridor and there are dead bodies in body bags on the trolleys,” she said, growing visibly emotional.
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No electricity to plug in computers
One nurse, who spoke to Sky News, said the conditions were “undignified” and “inhumane”.
“It’s not just corridors – we utilise chairs, cupboards, whatever space is available in the hospital to be repurposed into a care space, in the loosest sense of that term. These spaces are unsafe.”
Some spaces, she said, don’t even have basic electricity for nurses to plug in their computers.
The nurse, who spoke to Sky on the condition of anonymity, said she has experienced burnout multiple times over the state of her workplace.
“I have come to the conclusion this week I don’t think I can continue working in the NHS or as a nurse,” she said.
“It breaks my soul; I love what I do when I am able to do it in the right way. I like caring for people, I like making people better, I also like providing a dignified death.”
She added: “I want to look after the institution I was born into, but for the sake of my family and my mental health, I don’t know how much more I can give.”
With 32,000 nursing vacancies in England alone, data also shows around one in eight nurses leave the profession within five years of qualifying.
Nurses are being forced to provide care in hospital corridors and car parks. Pic: PA
Staff ‘not proud of the care they are giving’
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) says the testimony, which runs to over 400 pages, must mark a “moment in time”. In May 2024, the RCN declared a “national emergency” over corridor care in NHS services.
Professor Nicola Ranger, RCN general secretary and chief executive, said: “At the moment, [nursing staff] are not proud of the care they are giving.”
“We hear stories of escalation areas and temporary beds that have been open for two years,” she added. “That is no longer escalation, it’s understaffed and underfunded capacity that is pretty shocking care for patients. We have to get a grip on that.”
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She called the situation “a disgrace”, citing abuse of staff as another reason for people leaving the profession in droves.
Last week, a nurse was left with “life-changing injuries” after being stabbed by a man while at work.
“The NHS used to be the envy of the world and we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and say ‘what needs to change?’
“The biggest concern for us is that the public Is starting to lose a little faith in their care, and that has to stop. We absolutely have to sort this out.”
Commenting on the RCN’s report, Duncan Burton, chief nursing officer for England, said the NHS had experienced one of the “toughest winters” in recent months, and the report “should never be considered the standard to which the NHS aspires”.
“Despite the challenges the NHS faces, we are seeing extraordinary efforts from staff who are doing everything they can to provide safe, compassionate care every day,” he added. “As a nurse, I know how distressing it can be when you are unable to provide the very best standards of care for patients.”
Have you experienced corridor care in an NHS hospital? Get in touch on NHSstories@sky.uk
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