Malaysians get hookah health warning
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A hookah habit can harm your health, largely due to the many misconceptions people have about shisha, warns Dr S Dhesi Baha Raja, former assistant state health director of the Maternal and Child Health division at the Sabah State Health department.
A study conducted by the American Lung Association in 2007 showed a worldwide increase in the use of shisha in recent years, mostly among youths and university students.
“Teenagers think shisha is a herbal product and believe they do not inhale tobacco when they smoke it. This is wrong, because the herbs have tobacco,” Dr Dhesi said.
In 2010, a Monitoring the Future survey found that 17 per cent of high-school seniors in the United States had smoked shisha in the previous year.
Dhesi also cited studies by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to outline the dangers of shisha smoking, which include unclear levels of tobacco content in shisha itself.
“By law, registered cigarette products in Malaysia can only have a certain permissible level of nicotine and tar [total aerosol residue]. But shisha comes in many different packaging, so you don’t know how much tobacco content varies between them,” he said.
In Malaysia, cigarette emission standards are regulated according to the Control of Tobacco Product (Amendment) Regulations 2008.
The current maximum allowable level for nicotine is 1.5mg per cigarette, while tar levels should not exceed 20mg per cigarette.
Even the way shisha is prepared poses a danger to its fans who take deep breaths of the aromatic smoke before exhaling into their surroundings.
“At the very top of a hookah, the bowl containing shisha is covered by aluminium foil, upon which burning charcoal is placed to roast the tobacco. Toxic fumes are produced by the reaction between the burning charcoal and aluminium foil,” Dhesi warned.
The hookah’s glass base, which acts as a chamber for the shisha smoke, is also filled with water.
“This water mixes with the toxic gases and increases the smoke’s humidity, which causes the carcinogenic fumes to stay in the lungs longer,” he said.
As shisha smoking is a largely social activity, the nozzle used to inhale and exhale the flavoured smoke is usually shared between many people. “A study showed that the nozzle can play host to huge amounts of micro-bacteria and viral hepatitis such as tuberculosis and even Hepatitis A,” said Dhesi.
