"...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."
I 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.
I went looking for such a better list. One thing I found is this, for drinking water contaminants:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584401...
It would be nice to have a list like this for the Group 1 substances, I mean something that shows the amount vs. the risk and the number of cases caused by the substance.
For benzene in drinking water it has 0.15 μg/L corresponding to 10e−6 lifetime cancer risk. Estimated number of cancer cases from benzene in drinking water in the USA is 1 vs. 43500 from arsenic.
The evidence is very strong for all of those. They should be in Group 1.
the evidence may be strong, but the effect size compared to the relative dosing shows they are probably misclassified.
The 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.
That is why the categories are absurd in practical usage.
Benzene will definitely fuck you up faster and more thoroughly at similar dosages than cigarettes.
Having a glass of wine a day is extremely unlikely to cause any detectable negative health outcomes.
Replace the alcohol in that wine with benzene (21ml/glass give or take), and it would not play out the same way.
The LD50 of benzene is 980 mg/kg; drinking that much benzene every day would undoubtedly be fatal
Yeah, 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
How does it smell?
Sweet, but still kind of like hydrocarbon if I remember right. Definitely strang
I do miss the smells of O-chem lab. It is like hearing a crips clear note played when you have only ever heard chords. I think my favorite was thymol, a thyme extract. Something I've smelled a thousand times but never in isolation.
I'll never forget bromine, fuming brown off whatever high school reaction we were doing that day.
IMO benzene smells like gasoline (and AFAIK is mostly responsible for its smell), but somewhat sweeter and more concentrated.
It's a different, "aggressive" sweetness than that of chlorocarbons, which to me are far more pleasant.
Too bad they're all quite harmful otherwise.
Sweet? 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.
I 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.
Xylene, yes, very dangerous, used some for cleanup after painting swimming pools, threw up in traffic an hour latet.
I kinda like phenol most. And it's actually completely safe, it's even used in throat sprays.
That was the smell of cell damage /s
It'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.
You 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.
> 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)
Apparently 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-26...
This.
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.
When I studied organic chemistry in high school, everything was theoretical and done on paper. We had lab sessions for only inorganic chemistry.
In 1986, I made nylon, and I am 98% sure that we had benzene.
Lots 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
J&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/johnsona...
[1]https://www.jnj.com/media-center/press-releases/johnson-john...
They 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).
I'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?
> 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.
oh wow, you just won the "makes me spit up my drink from such an obviously funny lie" of the day line
Sure. 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.
There's another reason too, and inaccurate accusations could become libel/slander for evilCorp to come back at you for making such inaccurate accusations.
Reinforcing the strength of a future corporate product by doing their fact checking for them has got to be one of the weakest reasons for correctness and precision I've ever come across.
Please use a better example for the virtues of being correct, there are heaps better reasons.
In my quick search, the domain names were not filling me with confidence on the reliability of the site. Since J&J released a statement acknowledging their malfeasance, might as well take it from the horse's mouth.
My 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.