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"...benzene holds a special place in education. Generations of high school and university students have been introduced to the elegance of its structure and the
by chasil 1y ago
"...benzene holds a special place in education. Generations of high school and university students have been introduced to the elegance of its structure and the profound mystery surrounding its stability."
Admire it from a distance.
"Benzene is classified as a carcinogen, which increases the risk of cancer and other illnesses, and is also a notorious cause of bone marrow failure. Substantial quantities of epidemiologic, clinical, and laboratory data link benzene to aplastic anemia, acute leukemia, bone marrow abnormalities and cardiovascular disease.
"...There is no safe exposure level; even tiny amounts can cause harm."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Health_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Health_effects
- aszantu 1y agoLots of sunscreen and other beauty products seem to be contaminated with benzene. Johnson & Johnson was caught a few times putting it in baby powder or something
- dylan604 1y agoJ&J's baby powder situation was related to asbestos[0]. So it must be under your "or something" hand wavy qualifier. If you're going to sling dirt, at least make it accurate. The benzene use was in other products like sunscreen[1] [0]https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsonandjohnson-cancer/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona... [1]https://www.jnj.com/media-center/press-releases/johnson-johnson-consumer-inc-issues-voluntary-recall-of-specific-neutrogena-and-aveeno-aerosol-sunscreen-products-due-to-the-presence-of-benzene https://www.jnj.com/media-center/press-releases/johnson-john...
- bee_rider 1y agoThey mention the sunscreen in the other sentence of the post. I gotta say, your post comes off (maybe I’m misreading it) as a bit critical, given that you seem to agree with the other poster as to the underlying problem (frequent contamination issues).
- dylan604 1y agoI'm critical of making correct accusations. Baby powder never had a bezene problem which was being implied. Baby powder definitely had issues, but different issues. J&J as a company definitely plays fast and loose with product ingredients vs health safety, but when making accusations, accuracy is important. You wouldn't want chatGPT or claude to start saying that J&J was using benzene in baby powder after scraping HN for training data because we played it loose with facts would you? In fact, we call LLM incorrectness as hallucinating, so would you be less upset if I said that the other person was hallucinating?
- bee_rider 1y agoSure. I basically agree that their comment was sloppy, I just think for example: > If you're going to sling dirt, at least make it accurate. Something that might fit your sentiment better could be: > It is right to sling dirt, but it is important to make it accurate. There’s a ton of pro-corporate propaganda out there, so the good guys should stick together too.
- dylan604 1y agoThere's another reason too, and inaccurate accusations could become libel/slander for evilCorp to come back at you for making such inaccurate accusations.
- badgersnake 1y ago> You wouldn't want chatGPT or claude to start saying that J&J was using benzene in baby powder That would be annoying, but since everyone checks their outputs against trusted sources, it wouldn’t be a major issue.
- dylan604 1y agooh wow, you just won the "makes me spit up my drink from such an obviously funny lie" of the day line
- 1y ago
- xp84 1y agoMy favorite sunscreen, the cans of spray Neutrogena, was recalled for benzene contamination, I remember. 2 or 3 years ago. Thankfully they reformulated or did whatever was necessary because after a bit, they brought the product line back.
- isoprophlex 1y agoYeah, indeed it aint healthy... but that didn't stop me from smelling it just once in undergrad. I had to get at least one whiff of this iconic compount
- kybernetyk 1y agoHow does it smell?
- cenamus 1y agoSweet, but still kind of like hydrocarbon if I remember right. Definitely strang
- pumnikol 1y agoSweet? I'd rather liken it to period blood, but more metallic and kind of... vicious. Its smell is hardly comparable to its relatives xylene, toluene, ethyl benzene.
- ortusdux 1y agoThat was the smell of cell damage /s
- isoprophlex 1y agoI liked xylene most, followed by toluene. Maybe it's bias because you know it is carcinogenic... but indeed benzene isn't as nice as the others. Vicious undertones, that's very apt.
- cwmoore 1y agoXylene, yes, very dangerous, used some for cleanup after painting swimming pools, threw up in traffic an hour latet.
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- kccqzy 1y agoWhen I studied organic chemistry in high school, everything was theoretical and done on paper. We had lab sessions for only inorganic chemistry.
- chasil 1y agoIn 1986, I made nylon, and I am 98% sure that we had benzene.
- landl0rd 1y agoYou can get a little dose and it's likely not going to hurt you. "No safe dose" doesn't mean "any dose is massively injurious". You smell it regularly when you pump gasoline. Funny enough benzene used to be used (a hundred years ago) for aftershave and even for douches. I don't even want to think about what that did to those people's bodies.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gwbas1c 1y agoApparently Lysol used to be used as douche. If you have a long drive, this is worth a listen: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/the-strange-story-of-lysol-223144573/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-stuff-you-should-know-26...
- robocat 1y ago> You smell it regularly when you pump gasoline The EPA limits the percentage of benzene allowed in gasoline to a yearly average of 0.62% by volume (with a maximum of 1.3%). (Edit: replaced original sentence that was misleading)
- cyberax 1y agoIt's likely that benzene's danger is a bit exaggerated. Certainly don't smear it casually on yourself, but it's unlikely to be in the same league as something like acrylonitriles.
- ncfausti 1y agoThis. When an alarming number of friends (all under 40 years old) from the same small neighborhood in my hometown were diagnosed with leukemia I started to look into the superfund site nearby. The pond that is connected to the stream that supplies the municipal wells in the area was still disgusting (with visible oily residue on the surface) nearly 15 years after the company, Congoleum, stopped operations and the plant was demolished. Soil testing some years earlier revealed benzene, which has been linked to AML.
- GloriousKoji 1y agoI want a better list than the IARC because their Group 1 has substances like benzine and asbestos along side things like Alcoholic beverages, Chinese-style Salted fish and processed meat.
- oidar 1y agoThe evidence is very strong for all of those. They should be in Group 1.
- dekhn 1y agothe evidence may be strong, but the effect size compared to the relative dosing shows they are probably misclassified.
- oidar 1y agoThe IARC grouping isn't for effect size though, it's for certainty about carcinogenicity outcomes with exposure. It's not going to tell you how much exposure you need to get cancer. There are different measurements for that. IARC Grouping Levels: Group 1 - We are certain this will cause cancer Group 2 - Probable it causes cancer Group 3 - We don't know if it causes cancer Group 4 - Unlikely to cause cancer So when looking at something like tobacco smoking, we have lots of evidence that people who smoke get lung cancer. So it doesn't fit in group 2,3,4. So it goes in group one. For scales that measure exposure needed for negative outcomes, most of the time these are for chemicals that are/have been used in work environments. So EPA (and probably OSHA) has a threshold scale for benzene, but not for tobacco cigarettes. Most of the time, there aren't MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheets) for consumer products like cigarettes. But really, what is more likely - a person getting cancer from tobacco smoking or benzene? I would offer that tobacco is more of a danger than benzene d/t the easily available nature of it. So in practice, tobacco is more of a danger than benzene.
- lazide 1y agoThat is why the categories are absurd in practical usage. Benzene will definitely fuck you up faster and more thoroughly at similar dosages than cigarettes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]