Australia's gains in stopping young people smoking could be undone by e-cigarettes, a public health expert warns.
"If manufacturers of e-cigarettes are wrong about the harmless nature of the small amounts of nicotine in their products, millions of young people may be susceptible," says Simon Chapman, of the University of Sydney.
Writing in the Medical Journal of Australia, Professor Chapman says the tobacco industry knew "how essential new cohorts of young smokers are to its very survival as an industry".
ECs are battery-powered vaporisers that produce an aerosol or vapour containing nicotine and other substances that is inhaled.
"Today, an ever-diminishing 12.8 percent of Australians aged 14 years and over smoke on a daily basis," he wrote.
"The record low uptake of smoking by the young is most responsible for this.
"The prospect of the industry reversing this inexorably ruinous exodus has been given a major boost with the arrival of ECs."
A 2013 survey found that 15.4 per cent of Australian smokers aged 14 or over had tried ECs at least once in the past 12 months.
A Polish study found that use of ECs among Polish adolescents was dramatically higher in a 2013-14 sample than in 2010-11 and that the prevalence of smoking tobacco cigarettes also increased in that time.
The increasingly wide varieties of EC flavours made them alluring to young people, he said.
Despite its proponents saying the nicotine was almost benign in the doses obtained through "vaping", Prof Chapman said there was no firm evidence yet about their safety.
"But if the EC advocates are wrong, a less than benign genie with its pharmacological clutches around millions of young people may be extremely difficult to put back in the bottle."
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