Tweets About Acute Nicotine Toxicity Due to e-Liquid Exposure

Area of Science:

• Toxicology
• Public Health
• Social Media Analysis

Background:

• Electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) pose risks of acute nicotine toxicity due to e-liquid exposure (ANTEE).
• Understanding the circumstances and characteristics of ANTEE is crucial for public health interventions.
• Twitter serves as a platform where individuals share experiences, including accidental exposures.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe ANTEE information shared on Twitter.
• To contextualize ANTEE experiences and identify associated exposure conditions.

Main Methods:

• Collected 20,180 ANTEE-relevant tweets from 2013-2018.
• Excluded retweets, bots, non-English, non-US, and advertisement tweets.
• Qualitatively coded 1656 exposure and 1210 non-exposure tweets.

Main Results:

• Over half (61.3%) of exposure tweets were accidental, predominantly involving individuals under 18 (40.5%).
• Ingestion was the most common exposure route (61.1%).
• Health effects and assistance-seeking were reported in 13.9% and 12.7% of exposure tweets, respectively.

Conclusions:

• Twitter provides a novel data source for understanding e-liquid exposures.
• Social media data can complement traditional surveillance methods for ANTEE.
• Analysis of tweets reveals patterns in accidental e-liquid exposures and their consequences.