The country’s health officials have announced plans to test aerosols produced by e-cigarettes and vaping products as they search for the source of the 33 deaths and 1,479 confirmed cases of vaping-related lung illnesses, Reuters reported.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it also planned to test lung tissue and fluids collected from people who became sick, the report said. The CDC said that the testing may help with understanding what is behind the outbreak. Health officials mostly have been testing the liquids in vape products and have not tested the aerosol produced after the liquids are heated, which may help show whether that causes a chemical reaction that produces a toxic substance.
“They might be able to see components that we don’t see in the raw materials,” said an official in the New York Health Department’s Wadsworth laboratory, which has been testing product samples for the state.
Many patients became ill after vaping products containing THC, which is found in cannabis, as well as some patients who only used nicotine vape products, which has led the CDC to conclude that there may be more than one root cause of the outbreak. Two-thirds of the THC-containing vaping products tested positive for vitamin E acetate, a cutting agent which may have been used to stretch the amount of THC oil, according the report. New York health officials had tested nearly 200 products.
“We’ve got nicotine pens; we’ve got THC-containing pens; we’ve got Vitamin E acetate associated with a lot of the THC pens, but we are not in a position to say what’s the cause of this dreadful illness,” a testing lab official was quoted as saying. According to the report, many products do not have labels and suspect that many of THC products that do carry labels are counterfeit.