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Cancer-Causing Benzene Is Used to Make Store-Brand Cold Relief Medicine
(www.bloomberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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I have absolutely no idea what your point is. I drink more water than Pepto Bismol, but if there was mercury in it, I would sure as hell want them to stop selling the Pepto Bismol with mercury.
The dose makes the poison. What was the benzene level in Perrier compared to these medicines, and then how much was a person likely to consume in a year? Without a discussion of dose, it's pretty meaningless.
California has Prop 65, which is rendered virtually useless because everything is carcinogenic to some degree.
First of all, plenty of people take Mucinex every day, especially in allergy season.
Do you know what the safe daily dosage of benzine is? I bet it's not especially high when we're talking about something cumulative. And why should people take that risk when the article says this is just about saving money and there are safer alternatives?
This is some weird defense of big pharma.
This article is talking about benzene, not benzine FYI.
The allowable limit in drinking water by the EPA is 5 ppb. Inhalation exposure limit by OSHA is 1 a 5 ppm per day (inhalation is not an apples to apples comparison to consumption though). I’m not a toxicologist so I don’t know what exposure amount is “safe”, but dosage does matter.
This article mentions benzene coming from the carbomer in these formulas. The benzene is a residual impurity in the carbomer making process, and there are carbomer on the marketplace that don’t use benzene in their manufacturing process, but they are more expensive. I’m not sure the source of carbomer for these products, but I’ve seen reported on carbomer I’ve looked at to have up to 1 ppm of benzene impurity. Products like this might use carbomer up to 0.5 to 1%. So you’d expect maximum levels of benzene to be in the product (at the aforementioned levels) to be 10 ppb. So possibly at double the amount allowable in drinking water by EPA. People drink a lot more water than cough syrup (I hope) so it might not be that concerning.
The article frustratingly does not give amounts of benzene found in these products so it could be sensationalist—I just don’t know. So is benzene bad—yes. Does the cough syrup have concerning levels of benzene? Maybe, but just saying benzene might be present isn’t enough information in my opinion.