If you believe the stuff you hear about vaping in the media or from many of those in public health and tobacco control, you’d think that e-cigarettes were going to be a bad thing for the population. But a new analysis of UK data has revealed that e-cigarettes have led to an additional 16,000 to 22,000 smokers quitting in 2014 alone.

If there was one rule for conducting scientific studies on a topic, it would be to make sure you understand it first. But with e-cigarettes, that is not what happens. All too frequently, vaping researchers know almost nothing about vaping, and the result is invariably a study that ends up discouraging smokers from making the switch. Here are some of the worst offenders.

For those intent on claiming that e-cigs are a gateway to conventional cigarettes, the new Monitoring the Future study has a pretty devastating result: it turns out, most teen vapers don’t even use nicotine.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that a recent study found that teenagers are using e-cigarettes to vape pot. The headline finding is that almost one in five teens who’d tried vaping e-liquid had also tried vaping marijuana, but – as always – such an opportunity couldn’t be allowed to pass by without attempting to blame e-cigarettes for what happened. So, are e-cigarettes a gateway to marijuana now?

Just when you thought the whole formaldehyde issue had been abused enough, utterly debunked by subsequent research and relegated to the slush-pile of over-stated risks of e-cigarettes, it turns out there’s more. The Center for Environmental Health has announced that they’ve found “high levels” of cancer-causing chemicals in the majority of almost 100 e-cigarettes tested.

A new study being touted as evidence that vaping is a gateway to smoking really only shows that "teens who experiment continue to experiment," and actually provides a pretty solid blueprint for showing vaping is a gateway to anything you want. Here's how to design a study to "support" whatever gateway claim you like.

With widespread claims that e-cigarettes are a threat to public health, evidence-based assessments of the risks are desperately needed. Public Health England has just released such an assessment - updating their previous report in line with new evidence - and is strongly pushing the conclusion that e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful than smoking.