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.