Infectious Disease Expert Warns: Hookah Use May Spread COVID-19

Looking into the issue, infectious disease specialist Didier Raoult explained that the explosion in the use of the hookah in recent years is one of the irrefutable causes of the transmission of respiratory diseases, including the coronavirus.

"I hadn’t realized the extent to which the consumption of hookah has taken in our European countries. I think that in France, at least half of the young people have already smoked the hookah at least once," explains Didier Raoult. "If we pass this thing in which there is saliva, even if we change the mouthpiece, it is an extraordinary experimental model to transmit a respiratory disease." He confided that he had warned the Ministry of Health of the need to prevent young people from being contaminated by the consumption of the hookah. "The common use of hookahs represents a danger," he concluded.

At the very beginning of the coronavirus crisis, Didier Raoult had long called for the taking of chloroquine as a curative measure. Towards the end of 2020, he was the subject of controversy, and even a complaint from several hundred scientists from the Infectious Pathology Society who accuse him of having praised hydroxychloroquine to fight the coronavirus pandemic, also complaining about his "over-media coverage". They accuse him of having "prescribed unproven, at best ineffective, at worst dangerous therapeutic and drug combinations".