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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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Perrier got a huge amount of negative press when it was discovered that benzene was found in their bottles and did a massive recall back in 1990.
That was when the news actually reported on important things in a big way.
This will mostly get ignored.
The loss of journalistic integrity is the most damaging result of the enshittification of the internet. I've thought for years about how to fix this, but I can't think of any way. Information is a commodity with no intrinsic value. So "news" whores itself out to donors with an agenda or advertisers.
This was supposed to be better than the gatekeeping of the 70's and 80's where you had a few major papers and 3 TV stations, and they could bury stories that went against their self-interest or agenda. But somehow we've made it worse.
Two things I would never go to school for these days: teaching and journalism. And that's fucking tragic because those are maybe the two most important jobs there are.
This is why we have public funding and government and laws.
Unless you live in a red town that votes to blow all its budgets on police and subsidies to empty storefronts.
They also had a magnesium filter fail shortly after. They survived the bad press by buying up US water brands before the boycotts could take them down. They picked up Poland Spring, Great Bear, Deer Park, and San Pellegrino. Their only real competition was Evian until Dannon got big into the water game.
Source: briefly worked for PGA (Perrier Group of America) in the late 90s
I don't know about you, but I consume water more often than cold medicine.
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.
I think what he's getting at is, it has benzene, it's got what plants crave.
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.