Benzene in consumer products
Benzene is an archetypal Litagion agent. It’s so well studied, with a plethora of in vitro, animal, and human studies, that we often use its causal relationship with leukemia to describe what a GC score of 1 means. Much of the literature focuses on cancer caused by inhalation exposure, showing that inhalation is likely the most dangerous way for people to be exposed to benzene. Benzene is a known carcinogen according to the Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization. Benzene is certainly not an early-stage Emerging Interest risk – we’ve classified it as an Emerging Litigation risk. So when benzene made headlines earlier this year, it certainly caught our attention.
The headlines came from a company called Valisure. Valisure is an independent quality assurance testing company whose main business is analyzing drugs for impurities and batch-to-batch variation. To accomplish this they’ve developed their own tests to detect miniscule amounts of chemicals. Valisure was the company that detected high levels of N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) in raniditine and metformin, sparking the lawsuits about exposure to those chemicals from those drugs.
That discovery and the subsequent publicity seems to have increased Valisure’s desire to become a public advocate and has seemingly led them to focus their attention on benzene in the first half of 2021. The first product Valisure tested for benzene was hand sanitizer. They found high amounts of benzene in several hand sanitizer products. Then they turned their attention to determining the amount of benzene in sunscreen. Valisure found benzene in sunscreen and after sun lotions with spray-applied sunscreens from Neutrogena containing the highest amounts. It is hard to fathom finding benzene in something worse than spray-applied sunscreen where there is the near-certainty that users will inhale the benzene, not to mention the dermal exposure. Then consider the fact that sunscreen should be applied multiple times a day if one follows FDA guidelines for sunscreen application.
The CoMeta profile for benzene includes hand sanitizer and sunscreen manufacturers. In addition to blood cancer, benzene has been linked to developmental and reproductive injury. Though dermal exposure of benzene is not as effective as inhalation, any consumer exposure to benzene is unacceptable.
So, what will Valisure find next? Whatever it may be, Praedicat will definitely be looking out for it.