Children's Wisconsin physician featured in "Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul" on Netflix

Jessica Van Egeren, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
·2 min read
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A Children's Wisconsin physician is featured in a Netflix docuseries released last week for her role in connecting vaping, or the use of e-cigarettes, with a severe lung injury.

Dr. Lynn D'Andrea, the hospital's medical director of pulmonary services, is featured in episode four of "Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul." During the episode, D'Andrea, also a Medical College of Wisconsin professor, recounts the day in July 2019 when a team of providers connected a cluster of patients at Children's Wisconsin with severe lung injury due to vaping.

The lung injury, known as EVALI, stands for e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury.

The team of doctors subsequently warned the community about the potential danger of vaping. The warning quickly ignited a worldwide conversation that led to a better understanding of the hospitalizations and deaths caused by e-cigarettes.

From left, Louella Amos, a pulmonologist at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin and assistant professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin; Michael Meyer, chief medical director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Children's; Lynn D'Andrea, medical director of pulmonary services at Children's and professor and chief at the medical college; and Michael Gutzeit, chief medical officer at Children's, are pictured in the hospital's Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in Wauwatosa in 2019.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel detailed the discovery in a special report. The team included: D'Andrea; fellow pulmonologist Louella Amos; Michael Meyer, medical director of the hospital's pediatric intensive care unit; and Michael Gutzeit, the hospital's chief medical officer.

Meyer told the Journal Sentinel at the time that he remembered the moment D'Andrea warned him they may be dealing with an outbreak of some kind.

"I was on call. Dr. D’Andrea was on pulmonology. She came out of the operating room, and she said 'This is the third one. This is weird. There's something else going on. We have to start figuring this out,' " Meyer said.

As more and more teens presented with the lung injury, the team continued treating and questioning the patients. Meyer said that by July 16, doctors came to a realization: "Oh, these kids have all vaped in recent weeks," she told the Journal Sentinel.

Children’s Hospital doctors didn’t know it at the time, but they would be among the first to make the connection between vaping and an outbreak of severe lung injuries in teens that within weeks would spread to more than 30 states and turn up about 400 similar cases. At the time, no fatalities had occurred in Wisconsin, but six deaths had been reported in other states.

On July 25, 2019, Children’s Hospital physicians held a news conference announcing that eight Wisconsin teens had been hospitalized after vaping in recent weeks. The doctors warned they were seeing previously healthy teens with sudden symptoms such as extreme cough, trouble breathing, fatigue, weight loss, vomiting and diarrhea.

The Netflix docuseries is not the first time Children’s Wisconsin has been featured for its discovery. In addition to being in national and local news stories, it is included in two books: “Big Vape The Incendiary Rise of Juul” and “The Devil’s Playbook: Big Tobacco, Juul and the Addiction of a New Generation."

Jessica Van Egeren is a health reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She can be reached at jvanegeren@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Children's Wisconsin physician featured in Netflix docuseries on Juul