Comment by refibrillator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refibrillator | Hacker News Reader

> The benzene content of typical gasoline is 0.76% by mass (gasoline composition). A spill of 10 gallons of gasoline (only 0.1% of the 10,000 gallon tank, a quantity undetectable by manual gauging and inventory control) contains about 230 grams of benzene. The EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) for benzene is 5 parts per billion (ppb), or 5 micrograms per liter, in drinking water. The density of gasoline is about 0.8 g/mL, so the benzene in a 10 gallon gasoline leak can contaminate about 46 million liters, or 12 million gallons of water

> In 1983, the EPA declared leaking tanks a serious threat to groundwater, and Congress soon stepped in with new regulations. One of the largest spills was in Brooklyn, where a 17 million-gallon pool of oil gradually collected beneath a Mobil gas station — a larger spill than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989

Yikes, never heard about that. Yet another negative externality slipping through the cracks. Profits collected, responsibility socialized.

A carbon filter for your drinking water will deal with benzene and other organic compounds

The public should never be required to filter out pollution, especially from basic necessities such as water.

Morally sure, but the cost of trusting the authorities on this one is too high.

In most developed areas consumers don’t have to. The utility filters out benzene at the plant and it doesn’t leak into the water supply pipes except possibly during “boil water” advisories which are rolled out when water pressure drops enough for the pipes to leak in rather than only leak out.

Next they need to train all the animals to drink from public fountains

How does benzene impact plants?

It's an electrolyte, so they crave it. /s

Ah yes, let's equip every home with a reverse osmosis machine so oil companies can spill stuff everywhere they please.

Of course that's not what I said. But accidents and spills happen, and there are things you can do to make your water safe(r) if you are worried about it.

I mean, I don’t think it’s necessary because this is filtered by the utility but would adding $1,000 [0] to a home really change the economics of home ownership much? For much more comprehensive filtering for one sink the cost is $250, you’d install this on maybe 2-6 sinks of a home which costs >$300,000.

0: https://www.aquasana.com/whole-house-water-filters/rhino-100...

I'm from a country with no real guarantees about the water supply. Most people only have a filter installed on their kitchen faucet and just avoid ingesting water from any other taps in the house.

Drinking water utilities monitor for benzene. NY claims it is not detected in their drinking supply: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/drinking-...

Remember the outrage last year when some sunscreen was found to have few PPM of benzene?

The outrage from that FUD and people stopping use of sunscreen altogether likely caused more damage than benzene itself.

Nah, sunscreens are way more harmful than sun exposure itself. It's the sunscreen that will cause the cancer eventually.

Here's the chain of events: young patient gets bad sunburn, sees doctor. Doctor sympathizes and warns patient of dire consequences of not using sunblock 100% of the time. Patient agrees and mostly uses sunblock for several decades, forgets a few times and gets more sunburns. In fact, patient is way more likely to be exposed to powerful sunlight because of the invincibility conferred by sunblock.

Patient gets cancer from substances in sunblock, and feels terribly guilty for not using it because a few sunburns must have given her skin cancer.

The chain of events doesn't form a causal relationship that substances in sunblock cause cancer. It just expresses someone might use sunblock more often after the advice from a doctor.

Yes; very self-serving recommendation, isn't it?

No, In mean quite literally the described situation does not have anything to do with whether or not sunblock itself causes cancer. Like a whole paragraph of scenario was provided and then out of nowhere "and then they get cancer from chemicals in sunblock". Which chemicals, specifically? What do we do about the fact that nearly all women are recommended sunblock daily in nearly all beauty regimens for decades and yet facial skin cancers aren't gendered?

Replying to EatingWithForks

> facial skin cancers aren't gendered?

So that also means sunscreen doesn't work either?

Is this claim substantiated? I've seen all sorts of opinions ranging from "use European sunscreens containing non-FDA-approved UVA filters" to "just rub lard on skin, drink raw milk, and lift heavy weights". I feel like chemical sunscreens have been ubiquitous enough for long enough that any correlation in skin cancer rates would have been long pointed out by now.

No, they are an idiot. UV light causes various mutations at the DNA level, which accumulate over time and can lead to skin cancer. Skin cancers have some of the highest number of mutations of any form of cancer.

I can't testify as to Sunscreen, but I can verify the UV thing first hand: my aunt who went to the tanning bed multiple times per week got skin cancer so severe they had to remove a golf ball size piece of flesh from her leg.

There are recent studies going somewhat in that direction. The gist was more or less as follows: - the chemical compounds in sunscreens often break down into potentially toxic/cancer inducing compounds under UV light. YMMV per sunscreen. - metals can be used as UV blocks, and are absorbed by the skin, with potential health risks attached. - the proportion of melanomas in the population groups NOT using sunscreen was indeed higher than in the population groups using sunscreen. HOWEVER,the groups using sunscreen had a prevalence of aggressive melanoma, while the groups not using sunscreen were predominantly diagnosed with the least-aggressive type of melanoma.

You know, things have gotten too easy. In eliminating all the natural problems of the world with abundant food, clean water, medicine, electricity it seems that we can no longer discern cure from disease.

It’s like the vaccine situation. Are vaccines bad for you? Probably a little bit, some of the time. But boy! The horrors of those diseases the vaccines prevent! You do not have to look quite so hard. In some places infant mortality was 30%. Nowadays, 1 in 3 parents are not left grieving before their child reaches 1 and so we forget why we vaccinate our children.

The outrage was that 1. Sunscreen has chemicals which bioaccumulate with use and 2. No testing had been done on sunscreen as it was assumed that it was safe as a topical medication.

Combine that with the fact that sunscreen has not been shown to cause any population wide reduction in skin cancer prevalence and endemic vitamin D deficiency. I think that people have a right to be mad?

Do people really wear sunscreen for cancer prevention and to get more vitamin D? I would imagine it's more about preventing painful ass burns (place hyphen as you wish) and blocking UV skin damage that accelerates aging.

Yes, there are people concerned about skin cancer. For an anecdote, my uncle had skin cancer three times and became very conservative about always wearing hats and sunscreen.

In the Southern Hemisphere (especially the Anglosphere countries due to our heritage of pasty white people), it's to prevent sunburn and especially cancer. Yeah, sunburn sucks, but thanks to the ozone hole that forms over Antarctica and then drifts northwards, melanoma is very high.

And so is the sunburn risk, you can burn in 10 minutes here, but repeated sunburn increases melanoma risk.

It’s seriously grim at times - the burn time drops to 5-10 minutes and you want to mow the lawn. Suncream stinging your eyes you get it done. And you still get burnt, even with it on.

Car paint fades fast and everything plastic or fabric gets destroyed by UV in a year or so.

> Suncream stinging your eyes you get it done

As a ginger, the south sun is my mortal enemy, and I always struggled with sunscreen in the eyes when I got a sweat on hunting or tramping. And of course, all that sunscreen came from somewhere, so I ended up with sweat rivulet shaped sunburn on my forehead.

After trying all the brands I now swear by the Neutrogena 50+ ultra sheer spray on, only one I've found that stays on my forehead and out of my eyes, no matter how hot the day or steep the ridge.

I keep my can of it hidden away lest any of my kids decide to use it instead of the regular lotion because they like the spraying aspect.

The spraying isn't safe, unfortunately, according the FDA. You really don't want your kids to breathe the stuff.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2011/07/don-t-spray...

Compressed aerosol one isn’t safe. Ones with squirt handle are ok and great with kids.

I spray it into my hand and rub it on, as my forehead is right above my eyes, and my main goal is to keep my sunscreen out of my eyes!

And I don't want my kids using it at all, it's for my specific purposes, and it's expensive! ;)

Edit I see the "spray it in your hand" approach is what the article you linked suggests. Glad I've adopted harm-minimalising approaches already :D

I swear by Neutrogena too - the roll on pencils are especially good for face as it doesn’t sting as much for whatever reason.

Reading this was a real culture shock. In Australia, people definitely wear sunscreen for cancer prevention.

Here in New Zealand we do too.

> sunscreen has not been shown to cause any population wide reduction in skin cancer prevalence

Have you accounted for all variables? The moral hazard where people stay out in the sun longer when they're wearing sunscreen, the fact that testing shows there are manufacturers with poor quality control leading to significant differences between claimed SPF and actual SPF, have there been any changes in patterns of time spent outdoors over the years, and how about the fact that different cohorts have different rates and trends?

We know that aging increases the risk of cancer, we also know that repeated instances of UV skin damage make skin cancer more likely.

So, have a look at this graph (Figure 2).

https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators/occurrence-of-melanoma

The rates in the 25-44 cohort, who grew up when health initiatives about "being sun smart" were introduced to school curricula and promoted in the media are lower and trending slowly downwards.

Whereas the rates for boomers with a lifetime of accumulated UV damage are trending upwards as aging leaves them vulnerable to cancer if all kind.

Endemic vitamin D deficiency is going to need a citation, I think. In my country at least, it's only been noted in children who have very high melanin already, and then dress in our local "tough gangsta" style with baseball caps and hoodies with the hood pulled up over the cap, thus drastically reducing the area of skin exposed.

There is a lot of food which can contain benzene. Because it contains sodium benzoate that in some conditions leads to benzene.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_benzoate

>Profits collected, responsibility socialized.

This happens literally any time someone makes a mistake somewhere that doesn’t get caught. It’s not some magic “gotcha” that only applies to these types of industries and anecdotes are not evidence that an industry depends on it.

Here are other examples of people “privatizing the profits while socializing the losses”:

- a bad teacher who doesn’t lose their job for teaching children incorrect things.

- a cook that doesn’t get fired when you get food poisoning.

- a doctor that makes a negligent mistake and causes a permanent injury or death without getting caught.

The examples are endless and scale from individuals up through corporations and governments across every industry and mode of governance.

I recommend you don’t use the phrase if you don’t want to look dumb because it’s a pretty strong indicator of a lack of critical thinking skills.

In all of those cases the harm is tiny by comparison. It takes a shockingly small rate of food poisoning at a major chain to become national news.

>In all of those cases the harm is tiny by comparison.

No, these are all examples where the harm is significant when it’s scaled up to the larger population because they are so common. Bad education accumulates in one of the worst feedback loops of destruction you can get (dumb people vote for more dumb people supporting education focused on dumb things).

>It takes a shockingly small rate of food poisoning at a major chain to become national news.

the vast majority is never traced back to a restaurant because it’s written off as “24 hour flu”. It only makes national news on the rare occasions where it can and is traced back. This is reserved for food poisoning bad enough to cause hospitalization and/or death.

Individual subpar teachers don’t make a huge difference in education due to the redundancy on our education system. Curriculum is designed so if students learn nothing in say 5th grade not much changes. A school system filled with bad teachers is a systemic failure.

Again food poisoning without major consequences isn’t a big deal. Nationwide around 3,000 people in the US die from food poisoning, mostly from poor food safety at home. By comparison air pollution kills around 20-100 thousand people every year in the US, the scale of harm from all forms of pollution is vast but gets rolled up into cancer into a few other diseases so we don’t talk about it much.

PS: Pollution death statistics are really difficult to quantify accurately. Non smoking related long cancers are significant which mean some people who smoke get lung cancer from non smoking related causes. Modeling it is however dependent on what assumptions you make.

You’re talking about deaths and fixating on the wrong thing. Food poisoning causes massive economic harm in just sick days and that’s registered precisely nowhere.

Pollution doesn’t just instantly kill people, it’s again associated with vastly more sick days than food poisoning.

Deaths is just a useful proxy here for all the harm caused by each.

No it’s not. Pollution lands into a distribution of doing nothing or giving people cancer or serious diseases that absolutely do get counted.

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