On 2017 Sep 18, Clive Bates commented:

The Portland State University researchers display little awareness of the deep flaws in their 2015 attention-grabbing "Hidden Formaldehyde" NEJM paper - see Jensen RP, 2015 for the study and comments. Nowhere in the present paper do they check whether their operating conditions are a realistic proxy for user experience and therefore whether their findings have any real-world relevance. They dismiss the controversy over their previous paper as just differences in standardisation.

However, a major challenge is the lack of standardized analytical protocols. This issue has led to wide variations in interlaboratory results and has contributed to the dichotomy in the literature about electronic cigarettes and their potential health effects.

No, this diagnosis is incorrect. The wide variation is between researchers who use the products in unrealistic conditions and researchers who recognise the human use control feedback created by dry-puff conditions and so measure the products in realistic conditions. These authors are in the former category.

Creating a realistic proxy for human use does not appear to have influenced their choice of equiment settings. This was determined by:

Wattage settings of the battery unit used were 10 W and 15 W. These conditions were chosen to produce amounts total HCHO that could enable them to be conveniently distinguished, with the intent to produce a comparison between various sampling and analytical methods.

There are no human use considerations at all, as far as I can see. If they don't check for conditions that breach plausible human use, the whole work is unreliable as any sort of guide to e-cigarette health risks or for regulatory policy - just like the last one.

On 2017 Sep 18, Clive Bates commented:

The Portland State University researchers display little awareness of the deep flaws in their 2015 attention-grabbing "Hidden Formaldehyde" NEJM paper - see Jensen RP, 2015 for the study and comments. Nowhere in the present paper do they check whether their operating conditions are a realistic proxy for user experience and therefore whether their findings have any real-world relevance. They dismiss the controversy over their previous paper as just differences in standardisation.

However, a major challenge is the lack of standardized analytical protocols. This issue has led to wide variations in interlaboratory results and has contributed to the dichotomy in the literature about electronic cigarettes and their potential health effects.

No, this diagnosis is incorrect. The wide variation is between researchers who use the products in unrealistic conditions and researchers who recognise the human use control feedback created by dry-puff conditions and so measure the products in realistic conditions. These authors are in the former category.

Creating a realistic proxy for human use does not appear to have influenced their choice of equiment settings. This was determined by:

Wattage settings of the battery unit used were 10 W and 15 W. These conditions were chosen to produce amounts total HCHO that could enable them to be conveniently distinguished, with the intent to produce a comparison between various sampling and analytical methods.

There are no human use considerations at all, as far as I can see. If they don't check for conditions that breach plausible human use, the whole work is unreliable as any sort of guide to e-cigarette health risks or for regulatory policy - just like the last one.