Hookah as
Bad as Smoking
New Delhi: Sunday, 13 January 2013: An hour of puffs from a hookah
packs the same carbon monoxide punch as a pack-a-day cigarette habit, said
Padma Shri & Dr. B.C. Roy Awardee, Dr.
KK Aggarwal, President, Heart Care Foundation of India & National Vice
President Elect IMA.
Hookahs
have grown in popularity in recent years and Hookah bars have appeared in
cities all over the world that allow people to smoke the water pipes.
Users
inhale tobacco smoke after it bubbles through water, a process that some people
think filters toxins from the tobacco.
Hammond
and a student, in a study published in a letter of the Journal of the American
Medical Association, recruited 27 students who smoked water pipes for an hour
on three different evenings. Another five students didn't smoke the hookahs but
stayed in the room with those who did. The participants abstained from water
pipe smoking for 84 hours before taking part in the study; the bowls of their
water pipes were filled with water and 10 grams of Al Fakher mu'assal tobacco,
then heated with charcoal.
Researchers
monitored carbon monoxide in the breath of the participants both before and
after the experiment using a machine designed to detect if people are smokers.
The
exhaled carbon monoxide in participants was an average of 42 parts per million,
higher than that reported in cigarette smokers (17 parts per million). The
study also found that carbon monoxide levels grew in the room where the
subjects smoked hookahs and might reach environmentally unhealthy levels, as
determined by the federal government, during longer sessions.
Smoking
a water pipe for 45 minutes produces 36 times more tar than smoking a cigarette
for five minutes.
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