Ministry of Health ramps up vaping support by launching "Vaping Facts" website

Associate Minister Jenny Salesa today announced that the New Zealand-specific "Vaping Facts" website is now live. Wairehu or vaping products are being touted as one avenue to helping Aotearoa reach its ambitious target of being smokefree by 2025. The intention of the site is to offer key facts about wairehu, information on wairehu versus smoking and contextualise wairehu as a tool to quit smoking.

Hāpai te Hauora CEO, Selah Hart, states that the release of this new resource is both well timed and necessary. She hopes that this could help balance the significant amount of misinformed and unhelpful media coverage that has been recently circulating about wairehu. She states: "When we talk to whānau, they tell us that they want to learn from wāhine like them that have been there before, they want to feel empowered to make better choices but with information that’s written for them, by people like them. We really hope that this is a resource they choose to turn to when considering using wairehu to quit cigarettes".

The site has a number of features, including:

• A series of videos featuring healthcare professionals and young women who have used wairehu to quit smoking
• A quiz
• A cost calculator

Recent University graduate and mum, Arnia Appleby (Ngāti Kahungunu/ Ngāpuhi), successfully quit smoking using wairehu and shared her experience for the site. She says that "vaping gave me the freedom to quit smoking without taking away the socialising as a young person. Giving up smoking can be quite isolating, on top of being scary and a lot of other emotions. Vaping was the transitional tool I needed and I’m now smokefree because of it".

Selah Hart believes that the more relatable, empowering stories we have from women who go smokefree, the better: "We hope that this site helps inform wāhine who may be feeling some uncertainty about vaping- the potential risks, the long term effects. But what we can say, without doubt or hesitation, is that smoking is harmful- it harms nearly every organ and system in the body. This won’t be news to anyone who smokes, but the difference now is that we have an alternative- a solution that saves you money and potentially your life".

Review the site now by visiting https://vapingfacts.health.nz/