“I’m gassed,” she told her manager at Wallasey Wanderers in Wirral as she battled exhaustion, asking to be taken off at half-time. She was also complaining to her family about chest pains. She had previously been an occasional smoker, but had started using aromatic vapors and soon found it a compulsive habit. She was assured by her local GP surgery that the discomfort in her chest was likely to be a pulled muscle. “She would go into the local store and buy these vapes, but you’d never see the same bottle twice,” said Rachel Howe, 45, her mother. “There would be coconut, cherry, bubblegum vaporizers. It was constantly in her mouth.” On Valentine’s Day 2015, he collapsed in the street. Howe said: “A member of the public called me on her phone and said: ‘We’re with your daughter and she’s on the floor. Someone called an ambulance.” Rachel Howe, 45, is calling for more research into the effects of vaping and stricter laws on the sale of vaping to young people. She is convinced that e-cigarettes are responsible for the death of her teenage daughter Rosey Christoffersen. Photo: Gary Calton/The Observer Both of Christoffersen’s lungs had collapsed spontaneously, a condition known as bilateral pneumothorax. When she arrived at nearby Arrowe Park Hospital in Birkenhead, she was brain dead. “I’m always glad I escaped that moment when he went down,” said Howe, who lives in Wirral. “I don’t know how I would have dealt with it. When I saw her in the hospital, she looked like she was sleeping soundly, but I knew she wasn’t there.” Christoffersen’s family faced overwhelming grief, but also a lingering question: How could a healthy teenager suddenly collapse and die? Her mother asked one of the emergency doctors if heavy vaping might have been a factor. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with, with e-cigarettes,” he told her. “We will know in 10 years the damage we are doing.” The government is keen to promote e-cigarettes to smokers because evidence to date shows they have a “small fraction of the risks” of tobacco. Some doctors warn that rules on the marketing and sale of e-cigarettes in the UK are too lax and say more research is needed into the health risks. The Observer has revealed in investigations into the vaping industry in recent weeks how one of the leading brands is apparently breaking the rules for promoting vaping to young people on TikTok. Respiratory doctors also spoke out to warn of “a generation of children hooked on nicotine” and called on the government to urgently review the regulations. There was no inquest into Christoffersen’s death, and over the years her mother has researched the links between e-cigarettes and potentially fatal lung conditions on the Internet. Pneumothorax is a rare condition and can occur in healthy adults, but some doctors are concerned that it may be linked to vaping. The journal Respiratory Medicine Case Reports reported in May last year on a growing association between pneumothorax and e-cigarettes, but said it had not yet been established as a risk factor. Howe is convinced vaping played a part in her daughter’s death and wants the government to introduce stricter controls on e-cigarettes to stop them targeting children and young people. “There needs to be a massive investigation into this,” he said. “In the meantime, they should be treated like tobacco and sold only from a locked cabinet behind a counter.” Christoffersen, who attended Hilbre High School in West Kirby and City of Liverpool College, had a flair for drama as a student, starring in a stage adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange. Her mother describes her as “a ball of energy. full of fun”. She loved swimming, adored Liverpool FC and was a regular at Wallasey Wanderers, winning a local league and cup when she was with the under-14 team. She started smoking occasionally when she was 16 and started using e-cigarettes in September 2014, a few months before her death. Her mother said: “All her friends were vaping. I hated it because he was on it all the time. I believe he got addicted to vaping more than he ever did to cigarettes. He started having chest pains and difficulty breathing.” Howe said she believed vaping was likely to be the cause, but did not think her daughter would likely be at risk of sudden death. A week after Christoffersen collapsed, her life support was turned off. Her mother was at her bedside as her life ended. “I told her to swim, because she likes swimming. It was a little fish. And I asked them to open the window, and these shafts of sunlight came through and shone right on her.” Christoffersen died on February 21, 2015, three days before her 19th birthday. She had told her mother last week that she wanted her organs to be donated to save lives. She donated her kidneys, liver, skin grafts, valves from her heart and her bones for facial reconstruction. “Then I found out all the people he had helped and one lady even wrote me who took her liver,” Howe said. “My daughter died and helped save eight people. It’s amazing.” Now she hopes another legacy from her daughter will be a warning that e-cigarettes are not harmless. “I see kids vaping and I go and tell them I think my daughter died from e-cigarettes,” she said. Professor Andrew Bush, consultant paediatrician, Royal Brompton and Harefield and director of the Center for Paediatrics and Child Health, Imperial College London, said he was extremely concerned about the potential adverse health effects of e-cigarettes and there had been cases of acute lung injury associated with vaping. their use from all over the world. He said: “Lawmakers should take this seriously and treat e-cigarettes like tobacco in terms of advertising and plain packaging.” A safety review by the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products, and the Environment concluded that the risk of adverse health effects from vaping products is expected to be much lower than from cigarettes. The review found that exposure to particulate matter and nicotine could be associated with adverse health effects and that the effects of inhaling flavorings are uncertain. Between May 2016 and January 2021, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the UK received 231 reports of 618 adverse events believed to be related to the vaping product. Since May 2016 there have been three deaths in the UK linked to vaping products. Wirral University NHS Trust, which includes Arrowe Park Hospital, said an initial check of its records did not show that Christoffersen’s death had been reported to the coroner. He said it was not possible to carry out more detailed checks on the case in the time available.
