Covid-19: Government should ban the use of shisha in Ghana

A policy document on Covid-19 and smoking by the School of Public Health at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology called for a ban on the use of shisha in Ghana to prevent the spread of Covid -19.

He further called for a ban on the sale and import of tobacco products, including cigarettes, during Covid-19, noting that the disease is a respiratory disease and that tobacco could worsen symptoms and worsen the results.

The document which was prepared in August 2020 and copied to the Ghana News Agency, reports the main results of a rapid response study (the Covid-19 and tobacco project) and it was set up to examine the use and tobacco control during Covid-19 while building on an existing multi-country collaboration.

The study was carried out by Ellis Owusu-Dabo, Divine Darlington Logo and Patricia Amoah Yirenkyi with a grant from the UK Global Challenges Research Fund and additional funding from the Scottish Funding Council Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) at the University of Edinburgh. .

The document said, “The use of shisha is prevalent among young people, and involves sharing the same spokesperson who can be a route for the transmission of SARS-Cov-2 and other communicable diseases.”

He urged the government to increase tobacco taxes, ideally by 50 percent to generate revenue to support healthcare delivery in the aftermath of Covid-19, adding that; “It is very necessary to increase the tobacco tax to make the money available to treat people who suffer from tobacco related diseases as well as Covid-19”.

The document said it would reduce tobacco use among young people because they were sensitive to the high prices of tobacco products.

He said cigarettes remained the most common form of smoking, pipe (shisha), chewing tobacco, snorting, smokeless tobacco and “ tawa ” among other forms by Ghanaians and that the most recent demographic and health survey of 2014 reports the prevalence of smoking. in men at 4.8% and in women at 0.1%.

He said the regional trend continues to show high prevalence in the northern part of Ghana – 31.2%, 22.5% and 7.9% in the Upper East, North and South regions. Upper West respectively.

The paper states that recent data indicates that nearly one in 10 junior high school students uses any form of tobacco product.

He said current smoking could, based on existing evidence, affect the severity of Covid-19 and therefore there is a need for the government to integrate the risks of communicable and non-communicable diseases into health and well-being general population.