A new ‘smokeless’ tobacco cigarettes has been hailed as a safer alternative to traditional smoking.
Now experts predict that heat-not-burn devices are set soar in popularity.
A study suggests they will overtake sales of e-cigarettes, which are used by an estimated 9 million adults in the US and around 2.9 million in the UK.
This has caused campaigners to warn there is an ‘urgent need’ for more research into the health effects of devices which heat tobacco as opposed to burning it.
The team from the US analysed Google search trends relating to the heat-not-burn devices in Japan, which was the first country to sell them.
Their findings showed a huge surge in demand for the items – rising by 2,956 per cent in the two years from 2015 to 2017.
It’s now expected that the same could happen in other countries, after the first heat-not-burn device became available in the UK in November last year and products entered the FDA-approval process in the US in May.
