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?
> 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.
> 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.
You forgot living in the information and stress age, where everything is a crisis, or Trump's fault (or to his credit). We have no life to ourselves anymore, sex is like drinking, for many it serves to soothe the stress of just getting by, for others it serves to reinforce our deflated ego's, and for the rest of us, it is a low priority thing we can afford to, pardon the phrase, blow off...
