According to sb.by news, the Belarusian Hygiene Research Center has been conducting national representative surveys on students’ smoking behavior for 18 years, and this year it expanded the scope of monitoring to include a survey on the use of e-cigarettes.
The survey covered 39 schools and 3,493 students in grades 7-10 participated. The results showed that e-cigarettes are extremely popular among teenagers, with 15% of the students surveyed using e-cigarettes.
The survey found that as age increases, the number of people using e-cigarettes also increases, especially among 15-year-old ninth-grade students. In addition, there are differences in the number of e-cigarette users among male and female students. Female students are less likely than male students to believe that e-cigarettes are harmful. Data show that skepticism about perceived harms of e-cigarettes decreases with age.
At the same time, the number of teenagers unwilling to give up smoking is increasing as they age, and smokeless tobacco use has tripled in the past five years.
