Shisha breaks social barrier in the UAE

Dubai: Shisha, the Arabic waterpipe, has lost its manly association among UAE residents, with more women puffing the flavoured tobacco away, health officials report on World No Tobacco Day.

Smoking, and especially shisha use in the UAE is traditionally associated with men. Women did not usually smoke in this conservative Gulf Arab state in the past.

"Yes, there's a lot more women smoking shisha these days,"''noted a UAE resident to Gulf News as he smoked his own water pipe at a popular shisha cafe.

"It's usually the young ones. Before this, you never saw them," he added.

Dr Bassam Mahboub, vice-president of the Emirates Respiratory Society, said very few women smoked in the past, even when gedoo (another form of water pipe) was commonly used among a few tribes in the UAE.

"In Islamic cultures, it's not appealing to see women smoke," he said.

He said as time went by, shisha became popular with the advent of shisha cafes and tourism.

He added that equality has worked in the wrong way when women started to pick up bad habits and diseases more associated with men in the past.

"Smoking women are dying faster than men who smoke because smoking affects them worse,"'' he said.

A Swiss lung cancer study published in April found that women tend to be diagnosed with lung cancer at a younger age and are more likely to develop lung cancer than men, even though they smoked less. The study was done on patients at the Swiss cancer centre and did not study the biological differences between men and women.

Lung cancer is the No 1 killer among women in the United States, replacing breast cancer. Breast cancer is still the most common cancer among women in the UAE.

No statistics on the number of female smokers in the UAE are available, although a large survey is in the works to address this information gap.

Dr Mahboub said he expected the survey to begin in July.