Parents are being warned about vaping yet again as a young teenager was coughing up ‘pints’ of blood and the cause is believed to the the habit.
Keep reading to know more.
17-year-old Jayden Richardson was terrified after he had spent the last day of their family vacation in 2024 in Turkey, coughing up blood.
After the family flew home the next day, Jayden was rushed to the hospital, where his mother, Elita Richardson, shared that medics believed it was a stomach ulcer the teenager had been suffering from.
Elita admitted that it could have been because the teenager had been consuming a lot of drinks and greasy food, and eating kebab every night during their family vacation.
However, an endoscopy revealed results that the family was not expecting at all. The teen was suffering from ‘severe’ lung damage, which doctors believed had been caused by his vaping addiction.
Jayden took up vaping when he was just 12 years old to ‘fit in.’ He would finish a 10ml bottle of vape juice every two to three days. This is equivalent to about 50 cigarettes a day!
Jayden recalled the entire ordeal and said, “I was terrified. I never thought vaping could cause all this.
“It started off in Turkey. The night before I had a bit of chest pain but didn’t really think much of it whatsoever. I woke up the next morning, had a quick go on my vape and just as if I had a bit of a chesty cough,” he recalled.
“I went to cough a few times and it felt a bit phlegmy so I went to spit it out. I saw that it was blood and this put me in shock. I didn’t know what to do myself,” he shared.
He shared how he adopted his vaping habit, “Everyone was doing it around me. I felt like it was kind of to fit in but it just felt normal to do it.
“I was vaping everyday. I wouldn’t really put it down to be honest. It’s just a bad habit really. Once you start, obviously it’s highly addictive, it’s hard to stop.”
His mom took to Facebook to warn other parents, she wrote, ‘please consider vaping because you never think it’s going to happen to you’.
Jayden’s experience is not an isolated event. Now the World Health Organization has also issued warnings against vaping, pointing out that it is causing a ‘new wave’ of addiction to nicotine.
The WHO’s Dr Etienne Krug said, “They are marketed as harm reduction but, in reality, are hooking kids on nicotine earlier and risk undermining decades of progress.”
According to the numbers provided by WHO, over 15 million children across the world are now using e-cigarettes.
And in a more worrying statistic, it seems children are on average nine times more likely to vape than adults.
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