According to a report released on Wednesday, 6.9% of high-school students smoke cigarettes, pointing toward a steady decline during the past two decades. Although, students have stopped lighting up old-school tobacco, health officials are threatened by a huge increase in teens using electronic cigarettes.

The report by Department of Health has discovered that 15.8% of high-school students use electronic cigarettes that permit people to inhale vaporized nicotine in various flavors. The percentage was up from 10.8% in 2014 and 5.4% in 2013.

Shannon Hughes, director of the department’s Community Health Promotion Division, said, “The use of e-cigarettes, and this dramatic increase that we’re seeing among youth, threatens to normalize smoking again. “We have worked for decades to de-normalize smoking”.

The report has thrown in-depth light on the results of the annual Florida Youth Tobacco Survey. According to data released on Wednesday, the 2015 survey was conducted in the spring, and 5,877 middle-school students and 6,443 high-school students in 174 public schools across the state participated in it.

As a whole, the report has reflected teens’ continued taking steps away from cigarettes. For instance, 6.9% of high-school students said they presently smoke cigarettes, which is down from 10.1% in 2012, 13.1% in 2010, 15.7% in 2005 and 22.6% in 2000. The present status of tobacco use has been defined as having smoked at least once in the last 30 days.

The data suggested that high-school students, who said they smoke ‘frequently’, who were defined as using tobacco in at least 20 of the previous 30 days, have also declined. Their total was 2.5% in 2015, down from 3.9% in 2012, 5.1% in 2010, 6.5% in 2005 and 10.5% in 2000.

The rate of smoking tobacco has dropped but the use of relatively new electronic cigarettes has gone up rapidly.