16 May 2016 – With the occasion of World No Tobacco Day 2016, WHO Country Office in Egypt celebrated the launch of the results from a pioneering tobacco study on "Shisha smoking among Egyptian secondary school students: gender perspective". The study was conducted by the Cairo Association against Smoking, Tuberculosis and Lung diseases (CASTLE), an eminent nongovernmental organization in this field, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Population, Ministry of Education and WHO Country Office.
The study investigated the prevalence of smoking and behavioural, sociodemographic and economic factors associated with smoking among secondary school students, focusing on the gender perspective, in a nationally representative sample targeting 5460 students. The study revealed alarming figures whereby the prevalence of smoking any type of tobacco was 14.3% (21.4% among boys and 6.9% among girls). Cigarette smoking was the most common type of tobacco use (18.7% among boys and 6.4% among girls) followed by shisha smoking (6.4% among boys and 0.9% among girls). The prevalence of current female smoking was found to be higher than in all previous similar studies: 6.9% compared to 3.8% in the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS), 1.9% among university students and 0.5% among adults in the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS).