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Anyone who has ever spent any time in a Cairo taxicab, restaurant, office, lobby, coffeehouse, cafeteria or university, or even at the zoo, knows just how ubiquitous smoking is. "There is a movement to be tobacco free in the whole world," said Ehab Assad, a tobacco control officer in the Egyptian Ministry of Health. "We cannot be away from this."
Mr. Assad said that as a first step the government late last month banned the shisha, or water pipe, in cafes of the crowded Khan el-Khalili marketplace. But just a few minutes after the government boasted of the ban, hawkers were swarming tourists at the Khan, waving restaurant menus, offering what else but shisha. They were selling apple-, orange-, lemon- and cherry-flavored, tobacco-filled pipes for 10 Egyptian pounds, or about $1.80.
Such is the early fate of the antismoking effort. Shisha is back in the Khan after a brief ban, and all around Cairo there is confusion as to what exactly the government is planning. "The End of Shisha?" read a headline last month on the news Web site Al Masry al Youm. So far, smoking continues unabated. . . .
"The main issue here is that we don't have democracy. Accordingly, our responsible ministers are not elected; accordingly, they don't really care about what they do to their own people," said Alaa al-Aswany, a best-selling author and social critic.
"I am telling you that the shisha will continue," he said.
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/2766de/tobacco_in_egypt) has announced the addition of the "Tobacco in Egypt" report to their offering.
The Tobacco in Egypt report offers a comprehensive guide to the size and shape of the market at a national level. It provides the latest retail sales data (2002-2007), allowing you to identify the sectors driving growth. It identifies the leading companies, the leading brands and offers strategic analysis of key factors influencing the market - be the new legislative, distribution or pricing issues. Forecasts to 2012 illustrate how the market is set to change.
WAM CAIRO, Oct. 25th, 2009: Regional Office of the World Health Organization for the Eastern Mediterranean honored the UAE's Health Ministry for its efforts to combat smoking.
This came at a cancer control event held in Cairo in celebration of the Breast Cancer Awareness Month in presence of the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Cancer Control, Nancy Brinker.
The UAE was among other countries honored by WHO for their efforts to enforce no-smoking laws and anti-tobacco regulations including the federal anti-tobacco law and the implementation of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, says Attache at the UAE Embassy in Cairo Khaled Al-Shehhi who represented the UAE to the event.
Egypt's cigarette monopoly Eastern Tobacco (EAST.CA) announced a shareholder dividend of 4.5 Egyptian pounds ($0.82) per share, Egypt's stock exchange said on Sunday, sharply lower than the previous year's payout.
(Fortune Small Business) -- Want to plunge into the modern American melting pot? Try the offices of Social Smoke, a hookah manufacturer in Arlington, Texas.
Here a silk Persian rug and a piece of Arabic calligraphy, The 99 Names of Allah, share wall space with a signed photo of a Willie Nelson impersonator. There's a Chinese green tea set in the conference room, and Mom's homemade enchiladas are chilling in the fridge. Abrahim Nadimi, director of sales and marketing, is tapping a bobblehead doll of Dwight from the TV show The Office. "Welcome to the 21st century," he says. No kidding.
Social Smoke is growing gangbusters, and its success says a lot about the new international, cross-cultural landscape of American small business. It is run by Abrahim's father, Sayyid Nadimi, 51, who emigrated from Iran before the 1979 revolution, and his U.S.-born sons.
The Nadimis are tapping into America's deepening love affair with an ancient Middle Eastern tradition: hookah smoking. The company makes "authentic" Iranian and Egyptian hookahs in China, having tried and mostly failed to source them in the Middle East. Yet Sayyid is anxiously watching developments in Iran -- and praying the U.S. government will soon let him sell his product back to his homeland. Social Smoke is one of the largest and fastest-growing suppliers in the international hookah market.
All smokers will be intrigued by the advertisements promising them they can smoke anywhere, as those hanging next to cigarette packs at petrol stations in Cairo do. Featuring a woman wearing dark lipstick and puffing what appears to be smoke, after further enquiry it turns out that the "smoke" is not regular cigarette smoke. A salesperson gets out a small black box and demonstrates the "electronic cigarette" or e- cig. Does it sell? Apparently so. . . .
"We are concerned about the matter, and so is the Egyptian Ministry of Health," said Fatima El-Awa, WHO regional advisor, in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly. "We have given our opinion to countries in the region, and as a result Saudi Arabia has already prohibited the sale of the electronic cigarette, and Bahrain has set restrictions on its purchase," she says. In El-Awa's view, the e-cig is not healthy. "This product is being promoted with the claim that it is an effective measure to quit smoking, or as a safe method of smoking because it does not expose others to the danger of secondhand smoke," she says. "Yet, it has not been scientifically studied."
According to El-Awa, research has not been done to identify possible hazards of the e-cig. Although it is being promoted as a tobacco product, it is actually a pharmaceutical product, she says, as it contains nicotine, which is a drug. . . .
Nevertheless, according to the man in charge of trying to stop Egyptians from smoking, Mohamed Mehrez, director of the Tobacco Control Department at the Ministry of Health, smoking is still smoking whatever form it takes. "We take the WHO and FDA recommendations very seriously," Mehrez says, "and they have shown that these products negatively affect users' health, as well as the health of passive smokers around them."
The problem, as Mehrez sees it, is that e-cigs are creating a new generation of smokers.
The first thing visitor’s are greeted by in Eastern Tobacco Company’s (ETC) reception is a striking poster of Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx. In between them sits a massive pack of Cleopatra cigarettes, as if the well-known company brand is a large part of Egypt’s heritage. Funny, yes. But the picture doesn’t really lie. Eastern Tobacco products, including Cleopatra and Boston cigarettes and fruit-flavored shisha tobacco, are among the oldest and most well known products manufactured in the country.
Established in 1920 as a subsidiary of the Chemicals Industries Holding Company, ETC is the sole manufacturer of tobacco in Egypt. In the Egyptian market, at least 95% of cigarettes produced are domestic brands, the remaining 5% foreign brands that ETC manufactures under license. According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics’ records released June 2008, there are at least 13 million smokers in Egypt consuming nearly 80 billion cigarettes annually. . . .
Are you a smoker?
Of course. I only smoke ETC products; cigars and molasses. You know, cigars are becoming fashionable among women now. The only problem I have with smoking cigars, though, is my wife. . . .
Do your children smoke?
I have three children and I don’t encourage any of them to smoke. But I suspect that my eldest son smokes. He never smokes in front of me, though. Honestly, I feel ashamed when I see young people smoking. I feel sad. But I believe that ETC is only working to cover the demands of smokers, not to increase the number of smokers. You see, we don’t advertise our products. Personally, I feel scared when I see a young boy or girl smoking, but what can I do? This is the price I pay for my job. . . .
Fires erupt in big factories all the time and there is nothing specific you can do to stop this happening entirely. The factory didn’t stop working for one minute. We have four floors in the Al-Zomor factory. The fire started on just one floor and some paper reels were burned. It was amusing, however, to read in the papers that important files got burned in the fire. Why would I keep important files in a minor factory? Anyway, the fire lasted for a few hours, and that was it. We will try to work on preventing this in the future. I will start banning people from smoking in the company buildings, but what can we do? We’re a tobacco company. People smoke everywhere. This is our business.
Egypt may tax tobacco products to fund the country’s national health insurance plan, the Cairo- based finance ministry said in an e-mailed statement today.
Over the past couple of decades, the water pipe has become omnipresent in daily life. Smoking shisha is no longer just a characteristic feature of Ramadan nights or the fetish of a few.
Shisha, first introduced here some 200 years ago by the Ottoman Turks, has steadily transcended all strata of society, age group and gender. From its traditional strongholds in the countryside and modest tearooms, the contraption has made its way into the glitziest venues of luxury hotels across the country and onto the menus of the capital’s swanky restaurants.
Today, an increasing number are inhaling the molasses, including students, affluent professionals and even women. Is it simply a raging fad reaching its heyday? The result of smokers looking for a ‘safer’ or ‘less haram’ alternative to cigarettes? Or is it a growing addiction that is here to stay?
There is no one single answer to explain the astonishing spread of shisha, known in other parts of the Arab world as narguile, arguile or hookah.
“It is just a habit like cigarettes,” says Ahmed, a student from Nasr City, who says he smokes shisha only with friends at coffee shops. “It is a lot of work to prepare it at home,” he says. . . .
According to the Ministry of Health and Population, approximately 48 percent of the country’s adult population smokes. “Egypt has the highest rate of tobacco consumption in the Arab world,” writes Research Professor Heba Nassar of the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University, in an in-depth paper entitled “The Economics of Tobacco in Egypt,” published in March 2003 for the World Health Organization Free Initiative.
The water pipe has a controversial ancestral past. . . .
Cigarette advertising has been banned from national television and radio since June 1981 under that year’s law number 52 “on the protection against the harmful effects of smoking.”
Contrary to the assertions of some, smoking shisha is hardly better for the body than cigarettes.
Egyptian cigarette monopoly Eastern Tobacco made a net profit of 621.4 million Egyptian pounds ($110 million) in the first nine months of the fiscal year, up 11.7 percent from the same period a year earlier, the firm said on Monday.
It is safe to say that smoking is a big part of Egyptian culture. I was taken back the night we arrived to notice people smoking in our hotel lobby and that the rooms were stocked with ashtrays. Indoor smoking in public places has for the most part become a memory to me, especially in Florida. However, it's been about four years since I last asked the question "smoking or non," when working as a restaurant hostess in North Carolina.
After I'd recovered from my first shock of seeing so many Egyptian smokers, I later noticed the cigarette packages outfitted with large, graphic warning labels. The labels here cover about half of the front of the package and consist of photos depicting various consequences of smoking -- a sad-looking man in a hospital bed wearing a respirator, a hospital patient with a tracheotomy drilled into his throat, and a child trying to avoid second hand-smoke around his parents. To me, these warning were just as shocking as they so graphically warned users of the effects of tobacco.
I later found out that in 2007 the Egyptian government passed legislation that extended bans on smoking in public spaces to include schools, government buildings, etc and ban the sale of tobacco products to minors. In spite of the law, it's very common to see people on the street smoking who appear to be well below the age of 18 … just an observation.
A Bedouin man who works with his family as a cigarette smuggler has been charged with helping Hamas bring weapons to Gaza. Hassan Ali Suarcha was charged on Monday in the Be'er Sheva District Court with weapons smuggling and providing material aide to a terrorist organization.
Police say the Suarcha family, a Bedouin clan based primarily in the Sinai Peninsula, is involved in smuggling cigarettes and tobacco from Egypt to Israel. Cigarette smuggling is a lucrative trade – smugglers can earn twice the average monthly salary in just one day, and the trade as a whole brings in tens of millions of shekels each year.
Hassan Suarcha was one of several smugglers who began using his route to bring dozens of Kalashnikov rifles to Hamas, police say. The rifles were hidden in sacks of tobacco.
Results: We found statistically significant differences between these groups on nearly every measure: nondaily smokers tended to be younger and unmarried, but they also had higher levels of education and professional occupations compared with the other smokers. Nondaily and the light daily smokers were more likely than moderate-to-heavy smokers to be planning to quit and to have self-efficacy for quitting, and they were less likely to be smoking in the presence of their wife and children at home.
Discussion: Further understanding of nondaily and light daily smokers may aid in tailoring specific interventions.
I'm sitting at the site of an international donors' conference for Gaza in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik, which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is attending, with my eyes burning from the cigarette smoke around me and my clothes soaked.
It started from the moment I walked into the building . . .
People with no obvious reasons to be here are just walking around various rooms, blowing smoke and moving on.
This is, of course, heaven for Western reporters who are being denied the right to smoke in public places in their own countries. . . .