Kenneth Barbero Jr. was relaxing on his couch at home on May 16 when his electronic smoking device exploded in his face, knocking him to the floor.
Barbero said it was “like a M80 bomb went off in my mouth,” according to News10.
“The battery blew out—it was almost like a shotgun,“ said Barbero. ”It blew out and the vape went into my mouth."
Barbero sustained burns on his hands, knocked out “pearly whites,” and a hole in his tongue.
The Barbero family believe the vaporizer’s battery short-circuited.
Recovering in an Albany hospital from his injuries, Barbero will not be vaping again.
He publicized his injuries as a warning to others. “I just really want kids out there to look at my story and really think about it the next time they hit the vape,” said Barbero to News10.
This is not the first incident of vaporizer exploding. On April 5, a 14-year-old was blinded in one eye and damaged in the other after an e-cigarette exploded in a Brooklyn mall.
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the extension of its authority to all tobacco products.
The extension will place e-cigarettes, cigars, hookah and pipe tobacco, amongst other tobacco products, under its governing rules.
Retailers will now be barred from selling the aforementioned items to minors. It will come into effect 90 days after May 5, when the extension was announced.
A recent survey supported by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that e-cigarette use among high school students has skyrocketed from 1.5 percent in 2011 to 16 percent in 2015.
That is an over 900 percent increase.
