The Medical and Biological Applications Branch, in collaboration with the Continuing Education Unit at the Laser Institute for Graduate Studies, held an awareness lecture entitled (Facts about smoking) given by the lecturer Dr. Ahmed Mohammed Hassan, the specialist in ophthalmology and surgery. At the beginning of the lecture, he spoke about the tobacco epidemic, one of the biggest health risks the world has ever seen, with 8 million people worldwide fully dead, including more than 7 million who use it directly and 1.2 million non-smokers who smoke it against their will, and about 80 percent of the 1.3 billion smokers worldwide live in middle- and low-income countries.
Tobacco kills nearly half of its users, with research suggesting that those who started using tobacco in their teens and lasted two decades or more using it die early than those who never used it 20-25 years ago. Then he added that the risks of smoking to health include heart disease, lung cancer, lens aches, hair loss, wrinkles, hearing loss, tooth decay and emphysema. Smoking aids include smoking by one or both parents or even friends, love of experimentation, adult imitation, chemicals in the sugars, some affecting the respiratory tract, some of which affect hemolysis. As for shisha (Arquila), there are many misconceptions about it, where some think that it is a safe alternative to sugars or that its chemical materials are disposed of in waterpipe and that it is not addictive and can be left at any time, but the truth is that the amount of nicotine in a single hookah is equivalent to 70 cigarettes and Muʽassel (syrupy tobacco mix) is equivalent to 20 cigarettes, where the highest percentage of smokers is recorded in the Middle East and North Africa.
