Courtesy of The Johnson Family
This past summer, Piper Johnson suddenly became deathly ill. The Illinois teen was driving with her mother to college in Colorado. The week before, Piper, 18, had felt pain in her chest but had put it out of her mind. Now, in the car, her temperature spiked and her heart started racing. She ended up in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines—terrified and sobbing because it hurt so much to simply breathe.
Doctors took an X-ray and detected fluid in Piper’s lungs. At first, they thought she had a form of pneumonia. It wasn’t that. The doctors connected the dots when Piper told them that she’d been vaping—using e-cigarettes—for a couple of years. That summer she’d been doing it heavily, going through up to three pods a week.
Piper is among a growing number of people, many of them teens, who have recently wound up in emergency rooms with lung injuries related to vaping. As this issue went to press, more than 2,100 cases had been reported since last spring, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Forty-two victims had died. The youngest of them was just 13.
U.S. health officials are now trying urgently to determine what is causing the illnesses. Officials say there is still a lot they don’t know about vaping—including what’s actually in e-cigarettes. As their investigation continues, they have issued a stark warning to Americans: Stop vaping—immediately.