What the new Australian vaping study actually means for you

 

You may have seen headlines this week about a new Australian review saying nicotine vapes are “likely to cause” some oral and lung cancer risk.

Here’s the straight talk:

• The study is a review of existing research, not new long-term human cancer data. It concludes there is an “indeterminate burden” of cancer risk — meaning they cannot say how many cases, or how big the risk actually is in real life.

 

• Importantly, the authors deliberately did NOT compare vaping to smoking. Leading UK experts such as the NHS, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities and The Royal College of Physicians have already pointed out that this makes some of the headlines misleading.

Real-world evidence so far (as of March 2026):

After 15+ years of widespread vaping, only a very small handful of individual case reports of cancer in vapers have ever been published worldwide. These are extremely rare, involve unique circumstances, and do not prove vaping caused the cancer. In contrast, smoking causes over 7 million deaths globally every year — including around 1.8 million lung cancer deaths — with decades of rock-solid proof.

The facts we all agree on:

• Vaping is not 100% safe — nothing you inhale except clean air is.
• Smoking is dramatically more dangerous. The difference is night and day. Cigarettes involve combustion and deliver thousands of toxic chemicals (including tar and carbon monoxide). Vaping avoids that entirely. UK health authorities (NHS, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, Royal College of Physicians) have consistently said that, for smokers, switching completely to vaping reduces harm by a very large margin.

At Phoenix Vapers, we have always gone far beyond the minimum:

• Phoenix Vapers is our retail and online brand, fully backed by our sister company EL-Science — a highly regarded specialist in compliance, toxicology, and manufacturing of vaping products. EL-Science provides these services worldwide to other companies and has been a trusted name in the industry for years.
• We have been operating since 2012, with all products fully manufactured in the UK by qualified chemists in our own internal laboratories.
• EL-Science (and therefore Phoenix Vapers) is one of the few UK companies that performs full Product Risk Assessments on every single flavour we use. We invested around £2 million in independent toxicology profiles through Bibra Toxicology. Every single ingredient has a clean profile — none are mutagenic or carcinogenic, and all are kept well below the strict Health Concern Values (HCVs). Check out our socials below to see how we do this and our cool toys in the Laboratory.
• We fully comply with the Tobacco Products Directive (banned compounds, nicotine limits, etc.) and run GCMS batch testing on every product to confirm there is nothing in the final liquid that shouldn’t be there.

A digestible copy of our Product Risk Assessments is available at any of our stores or upon request from EL-Science.

We do this because we believe in real harm reduction — helping adult smokers move away from the deadliest product on the planet. Our long-term goal is to help you eventually quit nicotine altogether, but in the meantime we will never cut corners on safety.

Bottom line:

The comparison between vaping and smoking is night and day. If you are a smoker, going back to cigarettes because of this study would be the real health risk — it would literally cause far more disease and death. Switching completely to a high-quality, thoroughly tested vape like ours from Phoenix Vapers is still one of the most effective steps you can take.

If you have any questions about our testing, ingredients, Product Risk Assessments, or how to use vaping as a quitting aid, drop into one of our stores, or contact us through our website where we’re happy to talk it through and provide the documentation.

For more information on the effects of Vaping, our toxicology and compliance standards follow us on social media. We will put out some examples and showcase our laboratories over the next couple of weeks specifically in response to this article.

Thanks for choosing a responsible, UK-made brand backed by proper science and expertise.

 

The Phoenix Vapers & EL-Science Team