The Looming Long-Tail Risk Of E-Cigarettes

In July 2007, Dr. Cecile Rose, a pulmonologist with the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, Colorado, wrote a letter to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration describing a case in which one of her patients was diagnosed with the debilitating lung disease Broncholitis obliterans. Dr. Rose said that the 53-year-old patient appeared to have contracted the disease from approximately 10 years of at-home exposure to diacetyl fumes from microwave popcorn. By 2007, popcorn lung bodily injury lawsuits pertaining to industrial diacetyl exposures had already been pending throughout the United States for several years and there had been concerns about the true scope and universe of diacetyl bodily injury risks.