Sadly, stories linking e-cigarettes with explosions in California are not related to marketing and spiked product sales.
In a tragically real sense, they document the catastrophic downside that features all too routinely when such products have an inherent product defect that results directly in personal harm to a user.
Indeed, and as regards e-cigarettes, the term “explosion” is used in a most literal sense.
To wit: When the internal components of batteries used with such cigarettes to heat liquid vapor that is inhaled by users overheat themselves, a most pernicious combustion can occur.
The result, as noted in a recent media article discussing product defects and resulting injuries to consumers, is this: such combustion “can cause all or part of the e-cigarette to be propelled outward and into the face, neck, hands or arms of the user.”
How frightening is that?
The fear is far more than hypothetical, with multiple California-based cases of such explosions and attendant human damage coming to public light recently.
In one reported instance, a user lost several teeth and had to have a product component surgically removed from his mouth. In another matter, a consumer had to have a finger amputated.
A singular problem cited with e-cigarettes, as noted in the above-cited article, is that they “have flooded” into the U.S. without comprehensive regulating and quality control measures. Moreover, manufacturing sources are not always readily known.
Such factors can introduce some problems for an injured user seeking a legal remedy pursuant to a personal injury lawsuit alleging product liability.
A proven consumer protection attorney can materially assist an injury victim facing difficulties pursuing a recovery, helping to fully document an injury and its causes and also identify all possible sources of negligence that contributed to personal harm.
Although an e-cigarette is arguably harmful to health, that claim should relate only to the effects of inhaling, not something so unanticipated and horrific as an exploding product.