Ever been to a hookah bar? Seen any dead bodies?
Yesterday, a study in Public Health Reports reported that a single hookah bar session can expose you to as much as 125 times the smoke of a single cigarette.
Now as a smoker may inhale somewhere between 10,000 to 40,000 micrograms (millionths of a gram) of fine particulate matter (called PM2.5) from a single cigarette, a single hookah bar session may then expose you to as much as 1.25 million to 5 million micrograms of PM2.5.
Now EPA maintains that there is no safe exposure to PM2.5 and that any exposure to PM2.5 may cause death within hours of inhalation. The average concentration of PM2.5 in U.S. outdoor air is 10 micrograms per cubic meter and, based on that, the average adult might inhale roughly 200 micrograms of PM2.5 on a daily basis.
While there are no examples of anyone dying from PM2.5 exposure in a hookah bar, the EPA says that outdoor air exposures to PM2.5 kill about 570,000 Americans per year — even though a evening in a hookah bar involves about 6,250 times the daily PM2.5 exposure in U.S. air.