Students smoke hookah despite health risks

The number of hookah pipes in use seems to multiply every year, but students who smoke them may want to look into the health risks before lighting the coal.
A World Health Organization report said people who smoke hookah for an hour are inhaling as much smoke as if they had burned through 100 cigarettes.
Students who use it say they're not worried about the health risks because they don't smoke very often. Senior business administration major Bridget Edgeworth said she smokes hookah "maybe once a month" and doesn't have a physical addiction to it in the same way people have an addiction to cigarettes.
"I'll wake up with a headache after smoking hookah for a night, but I don't crave it like a cigarette," she said.
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Kent Bullis, medical director of the Amelia T. Wood Health Center, said smoking hookah is no less harmful than smoking cigarettes, but comparing the two is not as simple as the WHO makes it out to be.
"Hookah is different than cigarettes," Bullis said. "There are different proportions of nicotine versus tar versus carbon monoxide versus numerous other carcinogens. Plus with hookah you are typically adding in whatever source of combustion you are using to get the tobacco to burn."
He said carbon monoxide from coals used to smoke hookah are harmful, but the degree of harm is not something that can be quantified based on recent studies.
"There are studies of Egyptian men who smoke hookah showing what appears to be rates of emphysema 2-3 times higher than one would expect from smoking cigarettes," he said. "These are small studies and have not been duplicated in other populations yet, so it is hard to know how much weight to give them."
Various health organizations have published articles that agree with the 2005 WHO study, but they report different levels of harm caused by smoking hookah causes.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted similar numbers in their reports and emphasized that hookah smoking is not a safe alternative to smoking cigarettes.
An article posted on the Mayo Clinic website said hookah smoking is not safer than cigarette smoking, but gave no definite numbers on how harmful it is. It said the carbon monoxide that's inhaled from using hookah is worse that inhaling the same gas from cigarette smoke.