Cancer-causing benzene found in e-cigarette vapors operated at high power | Hacker News Reader

Cancer-causing benzene found in e-cigarette vapors operated at high power

sciencebulletin.org

10 pointsupen8 comments

>The researchers expect that some e-cigarette advocates will deny the importance of their work by saying “no one vapes at such high powers”

And how do they address these concerns? The burning process that creates benzene and formaldehyde also creates a terrible taste. It's like warning users to be careful with frying pans because food and oil that is burnt to a blackened husk has carcinogens.

Additionally, only one of the devices had benzene formation within stock power levels.

The 2015 study mentioned has similar flaws.

Sadly, all the negative press about vaping has just kept smokers smoking and paying a lot of money for something which, truthfully, still appears vastly better for their health. Many smokers aren't going to be doing any research on vaping so all they here is the negative press. Nice going government!

The really worrisome part for me is that legislation is being passed on this as well. As someone that has asthma and was previously an analog cigarette smoker I would find myself sick several times per year with a cough that would taper on for weeks. After leaving analogs behind and moving on to vaping I've been sick twice in 3.5 years or so.

I'm fully aware that vaping is not a healthy decision, however, it's certainly significantly safer than smoking analog cigarettes.

So…how much is "too much" concerning these "cancer-causing" chemicals? You can find "cancer-causing" agents in the air we breathe, the water we drink and many of the foods we eat. The question is, how much of this chemical is dangerous to our health?

Benzene is super carcinogenic. Any amount is too much.

> 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.

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.

"Any amount is too much" is never true, even for cyanide, asbestos, ...

From 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.

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