LAUSR

Livingston FC, a midtable team in the Scottish Premier league, has announced a new sponsorship deal. This may seem of little interest to UK paediatricians, but this is the latest commercial link between sport and the vaping industry. The UK worked hard to reduce the exposure of children to combustible tobacco and its toxic byproducts such as nicotine. Since the 1960s, teenage use of cigarettes has steadily decreased via a campaign highlighting negative health impacts, stopping advertising, banning use in social spaces, raising the legal age and limiting access in shops. The alarming rise, from 3% to 43%, in the number of teens using ecigarettes/vaping (2011–2018) has effectively reversed much of this work to eliminate nicotine exposure and addiction. In the UK, the current approach and legislation for vaping products are based on the assumption that they are safer than combustible tobacco and offer harm reduction to addicts. In this article, we advocate the application of legislation similar to that which applies to other nicotine delivery devices to vaping products due to concerns over their safety profile and potential harm to children prior to birth and beyond.