Vaping causes shrunken penises - you read it here first
Just stumbled on a news report from July 1998.
It made me laugh because there have been some strong denunciations of junk science in relation to e-cigarettes.
This week, for example, it was claimed that vaping could lead to hearing loss, a suggestion that first surfaced last year.
One of the most outspoken critics of this and other attempts at scaremongering has been Clive Bates, the former director of ASH who is now a leading advocate of vaping as an alternative to smoking.
Listen to tobacco control campaigners like Clive and you'd think junk science and public health propaganda are a relatively new phenomena.
If only.
See 'Penis shock tactics 'could cut smoking' (BBC News, July 1998) and this quote in particular:
Clive Bates, director of ASH said: "There may be people out there who don't care at all about the risk of getting cancer later on, but might be really upset if they thought it was interfering with their sex life.
"The advantage of the penis from a communications point of view, is that it is easy to imagine it shrivelled up and shrunken, whereas damage to other vital organs such as the heart is much less obvious or easy to visualise."
Fancy that!
The suggestion that smoking may be a significant cause of impotence or some form of erectile dysfunction always struck me as one of the more desperate arguments against smoking.
After all, when smoking was at its most popular in the Fifties, with 80 per cent of men puffing happily on their fags, Britain and other Western countries were enjoying a baby boom.
It's only a matter of time, surely, before someone suggests vaping can interfere with a person's sex life or, worse, shrivel men's penises. When that day comes I look forward to Clive's indignant response.
Meanwhile, here's that quote again. It's so good I had to publish it twice:
"The advantage of the penis from a communications point of view, is that it is easy to imagine it shrivelled up and shrunken, whereas damage to other vital organs such as the heart is much less obvious or easy to visualise."
PS. I've just had an idea. 'The A-Z of Junk Science'. Now, who wants to write it - and what shall we put in it?