A reconstructed computer tomography image of the e-cig injuries
Primary Children's Hospital/The New England Journal of Medicine
Posted on 06/20/2019 4:36:15 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Katie W. Russell, the pediatric surgeon who treated 17-year-old Austin, compared his injuries to those seen in “high-speed motor vehicle crashes.” Her colleague, pediatric ear, nose and throat surgeon Jonathan Skirko, says it looked “kind of like a close-range gunshot wound.”
Burton and her maimed son first headed to the local hospital in their hometown of Ely, Nevada, but were turned away for lack of resources. Doctors said they’d have to drive 200 miles to Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City.
They filled the teen’s mouth with gauze and gave him a “vomit bag,” says Burton, noting he didn’t receive any pain medication, then set off on a five-hour journey — almost hitting a wild horse in the process — and finally arrived around 1 a.m.
“He had a very swollen lower jaw and lip, a small burn on his lip and a huge cut in his mouth,” says Russell. “A 2-centimeter [¾-inch] piece of his jaw was just blown to pieces.”
Austin’s injuries required two surgeries to repair, the doctors say, which included adding a titanium plate to stabilize his jawbone and stitching the flesh wounds. The hole in the young man’s chin could have been caused by e-cig shrapnel or a wayward tooth.
E-cigarettes contain lithium-ion batteries — the likely culprit in some 2,035 vaporizer explosions occurring between 2015 and 2017, according to a British Medical Journal report. The U.S. Fire Administration says these batteries are “not a safe source of energy for these devices.”
A reconstructed computer tomography image of the e-cig injuries
Primary Children's Hospital/The New England Journal of Medicine
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
For manual transmissions, that is called a scatter shield.
Without reading the whole article (like a true Freeper) any mention that it is illegal to vape at 17?
This has happened a lot of times so far. How about they use a regular Ni-cad. So what if they have to be charged more. The trade is worth it.
It’s likely that the (closer to the mouth) coils used were titanium. It can be done but is not recommended. Titanium can cause a class delta fire when heated too much or too quickly.
Stupid should be painful.
When it comes to this type of drug abuse, obviously it was.
I don’t doubt that Lithium Ion batteries have caught fire. . . The failure rate of such batteries is 1 in 50,000 per year and millions of these e-cigs have been sold, so 2,035 is likely a low number for fires.
But they don’t “explode” the burst into swell, heat-up, or burst into flame, not “explode,” which is a newspaper hype word to garner clicks and and sell news. Even the infamous Samsung Galaxy Note 7 cellular phone that had to be recalled do to a 1 in 3000 battery failure rate did not really “explode” as the papers reported. . . Even though some car and house fires resulted from them. They expanded, swelled, heated up, and burst into flame. . . And not that many of them because they had not sold that many of them before they were recalled.
My point is that working in a dental office, I see LOTS of 3D panelipse x-rays of skulls and jaw damage. . . and what is being described here, with what is said about the LIP damage does NOT agree with an explosion of a battery that is inches away from that mandible. IT COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED THE WAY THE TEENAGER DESCRIBED! There is simply not enough force in a Lithium Ion battery to break a mandible. Something else happened. . . The kid is covering up something else that happened.
Had he said his HAND was damaged by a flaming lithium Ion battery, then, yeah, I can see that. . . Because that’s where the battery is. The LI battery is no where near the lips, teeth, and jaw where the damage is. It’s several inches away and cannot drive itself with enough force to break a jaw with what was described as the damage done in a “car accident,” especially in a linear fashion.
I note in the 3D-Tomograph (there is a distinct center of force) that the application of force appears to have hit somewhere below the lip line, at a point below the sulcus, the line where the teeth enter the mandible. It looks as if someone may have HIT the end of the e-cigarette with a hammer and drove the mouthpiece into the teenager’s face. Again, that’s not something the battery could have done. Such batteries don’t suddenly act like rockets. There would have been burns on his hands.
Yeah, it's a damned shame that folks can't destroy their health safely.
I respect everyone's right to smoke even though I think it's quite likely a self imposed death sentence. I hope they all find something like e-cigarettes to maybe save their lives. It's just how I look at it, obviously not the popular view in light of all the demonization of them that's been going on.
Found that out a couple of years ago, got a drawer full of 18650 flash light batteries now.
Big tobacco must be gettin desperate for cigarette slaves. The vape madness horror show has been goin full tilt for the last week.
But, that is NOT what is described here. The majority of the boy’s physical damage is internal, to his mandible, his jaw, with minor damage to his lips on the outside, from a battery "explosion" that had to have occurred in his hand, several inches away from his mouth, with his lips between his mandible and the battery. The plastic is weak. There are many parts between it and him. You could actually have a small caliber bullet explode at that distance from you with little damage because it’s uncontained. You’ll get burns, but not much damage.
The damage to his mandible, "equivalent to that from a car accident" does not comport with the power available in a Lithium Ion battery at that distance. Something smells.
Another possibility is that he tripped and fell, driving the e-cigarette into his mandible at the impact point. That could account for the damage I see, but not any explosion. A fall would account for any shattered e-cig.
My dad died too early as well. Smoked the whole time I knew him.
I tried to get him into ecigs (They helped me quit after smoking for 30 years), but he just couldn’t get used to it.
Now a home made one? You could literally make a pipe bomb.
It’s not life-threatening. We do dental emergencies and that something we’d tread in-office over the weekend and have a couple of our doctors come in to handle. The mandible break is problematic, but our doctors are trained for that. We’ve reconstructed mandibles after gunshot wounds. Takes a long time, but doable. At least all of his bone is still there.
I see a distinct pattern of the mouthpiece in the impact point. I’m leaning more and more to a fall injury. We’ve seen them before where someone had something in their mouth and broke out teeth and part of the mandible hitting the ground, especially in children with bicycle and motocross injuries.
Still not an explosion. Not enough burn injury anywhere.
The guys at my shop said that the govt. made up a new rule that ecig shops that make their own, “House Liquids,” have to pay $100,000 per flavor starting November 1st.
They’re discontinuing house liquids.
Ridiculous!
Every e-cig I’ve seen has a solid aluminum shield between the battery compartment and the heating element, the tank, and the mouthpiece. There is no way that any “explosion” would be directed toward the face of the user.
Did you read my post about titanium coils?
Outlaw assault batteries...
Easiest build deck i've found are the postless ones. SS claptons roll up so easy.
Actually, no, it hasn’t happened lots of times. The 2,053 reports is among multiple millions of e-cigarettes sold. . . And it wasn’t “explosions” but reports of batteries that swelled, overheated, and a few that caught fire, worldwide. These reports are from the anti-vaping people who will hype anything. The fact is that I have switch several four pack-a-day cigarette smokers to e-cigarette vaping and everyone of them is now a non-smoker, non-vaper. It’s the best way to stop the nicotine habit I know of. You just taper them off of the nicotine in the vaping solution until there is none at all and they stop on their own.
The vaping “juice” is a lot safer than tobacco, being made of natural food additives and flavorings, contrary to the hype the anti-vapers’ claims.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.