This past Monday and Tuesday, April 18-19th, my Fundamentals in Biomedical Sciences (II) class was visited again by Mrs. JB of the Mobile Drug Education Council. She came to discuss with us the effects of vaping on young students in hopes that we could share this knowledge with our fellow classmates. On Monday, she went through a side-show presentation that detailed some of the harmful effects of vaping on young students. Tuesday, we were able to share our knowledge with the seventh grade class.
Vaping was created to help adults quit smoking cigarettes, but now it is used to smoke nicotine, THC, CBD, and other substances. Vapes come in many shapes, colors, and sizes with nearly all of them being flavored. This variety of packaging and flavorings is helping to drive the vaping crisis especially with younger students. The liquids in vapes are not tested for safety and can include many harmful chemicals. Chemicals used to heat these liquids can have very harmful by-products including arsenic, lead, formaldehyde, and more. Vapes harm brain development as one’s mind isn’t fully developed until 25 years of age. Vapes also have many other harmful effects including teeth damage, lung damage, cancer, weakened immune systems, mental disorders and more. Vapes can also explode and severely burn one’s face. Since vapes are a new product the long term effects of it are truly unknown! It's so important for young students to understand the effects of vaping because at the age of 13, 47% of kids will become addicted to vaping while at 21, only 9% of humans will become addicted.
On Tuesday, we split the students into small groups. We discussed with them some of the effects of vaping while also presenting them with some scenarios in which they might come across a vaping device. We discussed how we could get both ourselves and others to not partake in any such activity. Next, we let the students do activities like running and jumping jacks with a straw in their mouths. This simulates what it would be like to do activities while addicted to vaping.
This was a fun way for our class to reach out and help our fellow wildcats!
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