The Karnataka government recently issued a notification banning the sale and consumption of ‘hookah’ across the state with immediate effect. The state health department noted that hookah bars were a cause of “state fire hazards and violated state fire control and fire safety laws.”
Noting that hookah adversely affects public health, it said, “In general, the sale, consumption, and advertising of hookah products known as hookah tobacco or nicotine-containing nicotine-free tobacco-free, flavoured, unflavoured hookah molasses, shisha and other similar names and the producing, procuring, trading of the same has been banned with immediate effect in the interest of public health in the state."
In 2021, the central government informed the Parliament that “Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand have issued explicit notifications/orders/advisory to prohibit hookah bars.”
Speaking with News18, Dr. Vivek Nangia, Pulmonologist at Max Hospital, shared how hookah (or 'shisha') and vaping cause great damage to the body and are "not lesser killers than a cigarette".
“They (hookah and vape) are definitely not lesser killers than cigarette smoking itself. We need to understand that the main component in all these is nicotine, which is causing addiction... When you are smoking hookah, you are smoking more of the crude smoke. It's the charcoal that is burning. There is no filter in between. Water is supposed to be absorbing some of those toxins but it usually does not happen. One hour of a shisha session is equivalent to smoking some 100 cigarettes in a day,” Dr Nangia said.
He added that hookah resulted in a lot of "environmental smoke because it has charcoal which is burning."
“So, people who are not even smoking are getting harmed because of the secondary exposure to the smoke (passive smoking),” he said.
He pointed out that another big disadvantage of hookah smoking was that people often used the same filter.
“That sometimes results in infections being transmitted from one to the other person. We have seen young children coming to us with tuberculosis, primarily because they had been smoking shisha,” Dr Nangia said.
Are vapes safe?
“Vapes have some flavouring agents involved in it which make you more addictive, especially the kids. When you come around with the thought process that vaping is safer than cigarette smoking, rather than using it as a 'quit smoking' device, it is now being used for initiating smoking,” he stated.
He further shared that vaping-induced lung injury is a new entity that doctors have been witnessing in recent times.
“In fact, in the last month itself, we have had three children admitted with us with vape-related lung injury,” Dr Nangia stated.
He said governments will have to ensure that the bans on hookah are effective. “Otherwise, it is impossible to stop this menace of smoking,” he added.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
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