MAUMEE, Ohio — It's a triple threat for young adults today; drugs, distracted driving and now especially vaping.
St. Luke's Hospital Thursday night hosted a forum on the three health risks and the target audience was parents.
Speakers said it's easy to connect the problems.
"Oh absolutely. We have to understand that the brain controls eveyrthing and if we're not putting good nutrients and everything like that into our brains that's gonna cause long term effects," according to Jamie Blazevich of the Lake Erie West Safety Program.
The hot topic is vaping. Kids are dying or developing lung disease.
Some states are banning flavored vaping and others want to ban it all together.
"Certainly a lot of the illnesses and deaths we're seeing are in young people. And they have a lung disease we don't see until people have been smoking 30, 40, 50 years. We have an old people disease," said Holly Kowalczk of St. Luke's Nicotine Independence Center.
She added many of the clients coming into the center are fifth, sixth and seventh graders.
It's frightening.
Kowalczk said it's time parents sit down and have a serious one on one talk with their kids.
"There's a lot of pressure in the schools for kids to vape. A lot of kids who would never think of smoking are in fact using vape devices."
One of the triple threats that can be prevented if kids listen to parents and not cave into peer pressure.
