At first, Jewish Hospital doctors were flummoxed by the case of a young male patient brought to them after passing out last fall. His symptoms indicated carbon-monoxide poisoning, but the doctors couldn’t determine the source.
Hookahs are water pipes in which tobacco is usually heated using charcoal and the discount Al Fakher tobacco smoke is cooled by water in the base. The tobacco is often flavored, and the smoke is usually drawn into the mouth and lungs through hoses, allowing more than one person to smoke at a time. They’re commonly perceived as a less-toxic alternative for tobacco use, and are available at about a dozen Louisville restaurants.
But health officials and researchers say the ancient smoking method, which has its roots in the Middle East and India, may actually pose great health risks, including carbon-monoxide poisoning.
The male patient at Jewish, whom Spiller would not name, was treated in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and recovered, Spiller said. A cigarette smoker may have a carbon-monoxide level of about 5 percent, but the male patient at Jewish was tested at about 29 percent, Spiller said.
“They’re the levels we’re used to seeing when you have furnace issues, house fires, car in the garage — the really significant carbon-monoxide poisonings,” Spiller said.
cigarettes-news/some-facts-about-hookah-tobacco have not faced the same sort of scrutiny from health researchers as cigarettes, but the risks are becoming better understood as the devices grow in popularity in the United States, said Thomas Eissenberg, a professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University who has performed extensive research on such pipes.
The increased health risk of hookahs is partly because of how they’re used. A cigarette smoker may take 10 puffs per cigarette; a hookah user may take 100 during a session, Eissenberg said.
And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that, in a one-hour hookah session, the user inhales 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette.
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