1 hour shisha use equivalent to smoking 200 cigarettes – FDA

In a recent news, the Chief Executive Officer of Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority (FDA), Mrs. Delese Mimi Darko, has revealed that smoking shisha for 1 hour is equivalent to smoking 200 cigarettes. She is urging individuals to avoid smoking shisha.

She explained that more than seven to eight million people in the world die due to the use of shisha and other tobacco products.

“Let us acknowledge the stark reality before us: tobacco stands as one of the foremost perpetrators of preventable death worldwide, claiming over 8 million lives annually. It’s a public health crisis that spares no one, particularly our children,” she said.

The CEO of FDA, whose speech was delivered on her behalf by the Deputy CEO for Corporate Services Division, Mrs. Yvonne Nkrumah, on Friday in Accra to commemorate World No Tobacco Day, said a survey conducted by Global Youth Tobacco 2017, showed that 8.8 percent of students were using tobacco products which included shisha, while 8.5 percent were turning to Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems like e-cigs and vapes.

The World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) is an annual event held on May 31 across the World to emphasise the harmful effects of tobacco and other tobacco products on the human body system.

This year’s World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) was dubbed “Protecting children from tobacco industry interference.”

The World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) event, which was organised by the Food And Drugs Authority in collaboration with the Ministry of Health (MoH), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and Vision for Alternative Development-Ghana (VALD), was to help educate and create an awareness about the strategies employed by the tobacco industry to lure children and adolescents to buy.

Mrs. Darko noted that, the tobacco industry, with its “insidious marketing strategies, preys upon our youth, ensnaring them in a web of addiction and suffering.”

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Earlier, Deputy Minister of Health, Mr. Alexander Akwasi Acquah, said through the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) Project 2030, there had been the successful development of a 5-year National Tobacco Control Strategy being implemented.

He mentioned that there have been significant improvements in enhancing inter-agency coordination, revising the smoke-free policy, and enforcing the ban on tobacco advertising.

Dr. Alex Kombat, the Head of the Research Unit at GRA, stated that Tobacco Excise Tax Revenue has increased from GH₵66.98 million in 2017 to GH₵936 million in 2023.

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However, he also noted that it costs the country GH₵668 million annually to combat tobacco use.

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