4 ms·

Benzene is super carcinogenic. Any amount is too much.

• humbledrone 10y ago
  > The levels, nevertheless, were still 50 to 100 times lower than in smoke from conventional cigarettes While I'm sure that avoiding any unnecessary benzene exposure is the best plan, it does sound like e-cigarettes are at least quite a bit less risky than regular cigarettes. So although e-cigarettes are not the risk-free panacea that a lot of users would like them to be, they still might be the better of the two options.
  • brianjking 10y ago
    Of course I'd like e-cigarettes to be a risk-free panacea, however, I'd also like a lot of things to be different in the world. What I do know is that e-cigarettes surely seem significantly less burdensome on health than analog cigarettes.
• gus_massa 10y ago
  "Any amount is too much" is never true, even for cyanide, asbestos, ... From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Benzene_exposure_limits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Benzene_exposure_limit... > The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set a permissible exposure limit of 1 part of benzene per million parts of air (1 ppm) in the workplace during an 8-hour workday, 40-hour workweek. The short term exposure limit for airborne benzene is 5 ppm for 15 minutes. [...] > The U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) revised the Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health (IDLH) concentration for benzene to 500 ppm.[...] If someone is going to smoke all day, I think that it's more appropriate to use a threshold similar to the one for workers (1ppm) or perhaps a smaller one like .1ppm. > This estimate assumes no threshold for benzene's carcinogenic effects. This is probably not true, but it's better to err in the side of caution, without being alarmist.