Despite claims by the World Health Organization (WHO) and some medical experts and physicians, some health experts from the University College London (UCL) believe that electronic cigarettes can actually save 6,000 lives for every one million smokers.

The said group of researchers calls WHO's claims that the harmful effects of e-cigarettes are unknown and, that the product re-normalizes smoking as "alarmist" and "bizarre".

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UK Researchers believe that if the 9 million smokers in the country shifted to e-cigarettes from traditional cigarettes, around 54,000 premature deaths could be prevented annually.

Last week, WHO pushed that the product be banned from public areas and workplaces, based on the belief that they could increase nicotine and other toxins that could harm the health.

However, WHO admitted that the toxins released by cigarettes are insignificant compared to the usual pollution one breathes in when exposed to city streets.

Prof Robert West from the UCL team shared, "You have to be a bit crazy to carry on smoking conventional cigarettes when there are e-cigarettes available," he said. "The vapour contains nothing like the concentrations of carcinogens and toxins as cigarette smoke. In fact, concentrations are almost all well below a twentieth of cigarettes."

The researchers from UCL also contested WHO's claims that e-cigarettes are transitional tools for people to start smoking traditional cigarettes. The team pointed out that according to the Smoking Toolkit study, a monthly survey of smokers in England, non-smokers who opted to try e-cigarettes are less than 1 percent of the total population.

Dr Jamie Brown, who also co-authored the study shared that the product may pose as a threat and as an opportunity. However, health scientists are merely looking at it as a threat.

A team at the National Addiction Centre based at King's College London and the Tobacco Dependence Unit at Queen Mary University analyzed the WHO research and found that many of the organization's conclusions were "misleading". 

Prof Ann McNeill, from the national addiction center at King's College London, shared that they were surprised by how negative the review of e-cigarettes was."E-cigarettes are new and we certainly don't yet have all the answers as to their long-term health impact, but what we do know is that they are much safer than cigarettes, which kill over 6 million people a year worldwide," she explained.