Friday, September 21, 2012

CDC continues to twist facts for ANTZ agenda


The CDC recently posted this on its Facebook page. I've never even tried a hookah and it only took me 10 minutes of research to find this out. I'm not trying to advocate for using hookahs, but the CDC should be telling people the TRUTH in their messages, not twisting it for its agenda. If it keeps doing this, people may no longer trust what they say at all.



They said the info came from the 2012 Surgeon General report, which in turn cites a 2005 W.H.O. report on "waterpipes." While the WHO report said that " waterpipe smoking sessions typically last 20-80 minutes and 50-200 puffs...[a] waterpipe smoker may therefore inhale as much smoke during one session as a cigarette smoker would inhale consuming 100 or more cigarettes," the Surgeon General report instead states " In a typical 1-hour hookah smoking session, users may inhale 100-200 times the amount of smoke they would inhale from a single cigarette" (adding in the "200") and then this graphic of course ONLY mentions the number "200" and claims it's "equivalent to inhaling up to 200 cigarettes," which has a completely different meaning.

WHO was reporting on the NUMBER OF PUFFS and the VOLUME of what is inhaled - NOT the level of toxins and carcinogens IN what is inhaled.  Hookah tobacco is mixed heavily with food-grade glycerin and other harmless liquids that is heat up into steam and then cooled down in the water to create a vapor (In a lot of ways, it is very similar to e-cigarette vapor.) It is not burned tobacco like cigarettes, so it does not contain the same properties as cigarette SMOKE, which contains most of the particulates, toxins and carcinogens they claim cause "tobacco-related death and disease." Additionally, people do not typically spend an entire day in a hookah bar - they usually go one or two times a week, unlike smokers who smoke every day.

Therefore, to claim that one hour of inhaling hookah vapor is EQUIVALENT to inhaling up to 200 cigarettes is MISLEADING at best. I'd say that claim is "equivalent" to a LIE, to make it sound as though hookah vapor has been found to contain up to 200 times the amount of toxins and carcinogens found in cigarette smoke, which is NOT what the WHO report stated.

I'm posting links to the original reports upon which this graphic is supposedly based. Let's see if the CDC leaves my response post on its Facebook page up so people can view the facts for themselves.
http://www.who.int/tobacco/global_interaction/tobreg/Waterpipe%20recommendation_Final.pdf
http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/reports/preventing-youth-tobacco-use/full-report.pdf

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