With more than 1,600 vaping-related lung injury cases diagnosed as of Tuesday, Oct. 22, the counselors chose to focus on the dangers of vaping for this month’s Farmer Focus. School resource officer Matson Tiberghien was chosen to speak on this issue during block lunch on Wednesday, Oct. 23 in room F207.

“We wanted to create Farmer Focus sessions because we wanted to give parents [an] opportunity to come and learn about issues facing students today,” counselor Maria Ortiz said.

Vaping has become prominent in teenagers’ lives during high school years. Videos online have surfaced of teens performing vape tricks; the popularity of these videos encourages teens to try to recreate them, causing a domino effect adults want to prevent.

“It is easy to hide, it’s perceived as cool to do and it is highly prevalent,” Tiberghien said. “I want to say about 50% of junior high kids or juveniles have said they’ve tried it at least once and most of those continued doing after. It’s a big problem.”

While teenagers understand the long-term effects of what it can do to the body, they can feel pressured into vaping because they want to be accepted by those around them.

“I know vaping is becoming more and more popular in teens, and having teens myself, I wanted to educate myself so that I could be better prepared if any questions came my way,” parent Stephanie Knibbs said.

Vaping is portrayed as an alternative for smoking, but it still contains the same nicotine ingredients found in cigarettes. Vaping is equally as bad as smoking, according to Knibbs. Vaping is considered an issue because of nicotine’s addictive properties and the negative effects it has on the body, an issue schools want to prevent as much as they can.

“The chemicals in the vaping liquid are unknown to a lot of people,” Tiberghien said. “Last I heard there’s up to 1,300 or 1,400 different chemicals they can use, which are now causing a lot of cancers in people and making lungs shut down. It’s causing death.”