Vape testing kit a response to reports of student collapses from suspected contaminated vapes
The kit has been created by Bath Uni's Professor Christopher Pudney and is being trialled by Wiltshire Police
A university professor who created a vape testing kit being piloted with Wiltshire Police has told us he hopes the kit is part of the solution to stopping school children becoming unwell from contaminated vapes.
Professor Christopher Pudney and his team created the kit in response to reports of children collapsing in schools after vaping, with the vapes suspected of being laced with drugs such as Spice and THC.
Wiltshire Police is among the Forces piloting the kit.
Chris does a lot of work with UK prisons, where synthetic drugs, like Spice, are endemic, but have recently been found to be contaminating vapes purchased by children.
He said: "The challenge is it comes in soaked on sheets of paper. That's very hard to detect and so we developed essentially a hand scanning device for detecting these drugs on paper."
Chris told us that his were motivated to adapt their technology in order to test it for vapes: "We will be able to use that tool to actually understand what's actually in vapes in schools, what are people using and what is causing children to collapse."
He said working with Wiltshire Police, has been very effective, allowing them test the kit in a way that works for them.
It's allowed schools and officers to work collaboratively to identify hotspot areas, with police able to respond quickly with the test kit, which is easy to carry around.
Chris said working with Police rather than schools was an easy decision.
He told us: "Doing this via the police versus via the schools is a really conscious decision. Every police force I've worked with throughout the country, has no interest in criminalising young people for these vapes.
"It's just not on their radar whatsoever, their motivation is to find and identify young people who are at risk and put them in support services and that's been a really effective relationship, I've seen that working really, really well."
The test kit has even had a surprise benefit.
Chris told us Spice can cause seizures: "If a child has a fit, that can happen for a bunch of different reasons, but having some evidence that it's drug induced is really valuable going forward for the young person.
"It puts them on a kind of different pathway and you're going to treat them in a different way."
There are hopes that they can add to the palate of dugs that can be detected, with Chris's team working hard to implement improvements requested by Police using the equipment.
Chris said he hopes to secure a commercial partner to make the kits available for purchase, but, in the meantime, the aim is to make them available on a regional level where they can be shared among Forces.
He added that he's hopeful of the kit helping prevent children from coming into contact with substances like Spice, which has a high risk of a negative health outcome.
"It can't fix that problem, but we hope it's part of that solution," he said.