Maybe it did cause his problems, maybe it didn't. My mom had lymphoma too and never used much mineral spirits. Lots of things cause it, could be the hydrocarbons in automotive exhaust for all we know (exposure to that is vastly higher than to mineral spirits for most people).
The thing is to do what you think is right for you. Some of us are happier not worrying about casual exposure to small amounts of common solvents. Others worry about it and suit up like the stuff is plutonium (clearly I'm one of the not worriers ). Do what's right for your own comfort level and laugh off all those others who think you're the one who's nuts.
Maybe.... whatever. Could be cosmic rays too. There could be multiple causes.
People who rarely or never handle minerals spirits get the disease as well. There goes your causality.
Believe it if you like, we're certainly asked to believe less plausible things these days so I can't fault you for it. I remain skeptical however, and mineral spirits is a useful and effective solvent to me.
Same could be said about smoking: many non-smokers get same diseases, should we question causation here too?
My worries is about prolonged exposure. On any given day I'm using maybe 50ml of my oil+kerosene concoction, I can feel a slight smell of kerosene while directly over my stones. I don't think this affects my health at any concerning rate. There are also other chemicals in my garage: turps, mineral spirits, acetone, various silicons and paints, dyes. They all probably produce some fumes, yet there's no sharp odor, or rather it smells like any other garage used for other than storage. Or at least this is what passers by say.
At the same time living in a densely populated are means breathing all kinds of exhausts including from garbage disposal, rubber dust, there are power plants, factories, a coal terminal in the area, not mentioning Dupont and their practices of dumping carcinogens in residential areas for literally a century. Most rivers in the area were biologically dead at some point, fishing is still forbidden in most of them. If anything — these will be the major cause, but it would be nice not to add on top of it.
Besides, all the things mentioned in this thread are kinda bad for skin. If I miss as much one "Working hands" application my fingers and palms look like I'm about to shed. No matter how I try I can't avoid skin contact 100%, so the idea was to either find mineral oil of proper viscosity (like 0W-20 mentioned), or find some less aggressive solvent. So far odorless mineral spirits seems to be the best fit, according to safety sheets it doesn't contain known carcinogens, is not (or at least mild) skin irritant and has quite low overall toxicity. Going to try it for a change.
Not trying to say your approaches wrong or dangerous, but with cancer there's rarely such a one to one casualty so that the appearance of cancer without attribution from a particular source means there's no causality. As you rightly suggest, many times the appearance of a cancerous growth is overdetermined - so many sources. I also think that general public's application of risk from chemicals in a non-industrial setting is very low and is the effect of industry trying to ensure $ over safety. Even if the risk easily remediated (wearing nitric gloves, e.g.), industry doesn't want to raise general consumers' safety consciousness.
There sure is something macho about kerosene isn't there?
Our children will open up our tool chests twenty years after we're gone and get a whiff of kerosene and old pipe tobacco and sigh: "a real man's man."
We had our youngest child, a daughter, when I was probably too old to be having kids. I figure I'll be dead or near it when she needs me the most. Changed my outlook.
"Same could be said about smoking: many non-smokers get same diseases, should we question causation here too?"
At the levels of tar that a smoker experiences, there is no question of causality, I don't think there has been for nearly a century or more - whenever they earned the nick name "coffin nails" (guessing 1920's, maybe earlier). If we were to compare that to mineral spirits or kerosene, I would say an apples to apples comparison would be having a 5 minute solvent dip every hour or so for many decades. That is the equivalent of smoking (perhaps a little hyperbolic, but the lungs are vastly more sensitive and absorbent than skin).
An objective observer would not be surprised by any number of medical problems cropping up in a person seeing such extreme exposure to solvents.
If we were to compare that to mineral spirits or kerosene, I would say an apples to apples comparison would be having a 5 minute solvent dip every hour or so for many decades. That is the equivalent of smoking (perhaps a little hyperbolic, but the lungs are vastly more sensitive and absorbent than skin).
Mineral spirits, kerosene and other solvents in the shop evaporate. If not the contact with your skin, breathing in those fumes can be detrimental.
Just to add more fuel to the fire, if your shop is in the basement, like mine, I'd be worried about breathing in all that Radon gas, lol
Another strategy is to learn to live with the inexactitude of multivariate decisions around personal safety. I don't mean by this that you and others are analyzing multiple variables. I mean we should change the level of certainty we expect to achieve when doing our balances. As you noted, some people try to avoid all risk and wear hazmat suits, while others decide that if there's no overwhelming evidence they've seen, it's best to ignore and go on. Either approach belies a need to make the decision once and for all and then stick to it, damn the torpedos. I try to get comfortable with leaving these questions undecided in some sense and adjust my calculations as I learn more knowing that this is not the last time I'll have to address the issue.
But I'm also the worst procrastinator. So there's that too.
I think it is mostly the benzene in the mineral spirits that is the known cause of cancer. To minimize my exposure, I use only odorless mineral spirits in my shop, which has most of the benzene removed. Of course, mineral spirits are not the only source of benzene exposure to the general public. You can get a lot more of it from breathing vaporized gasoline while filling your gas tank. I'm lucky to be living in NJ, where we are not allowed to fill our own gas tanks, but I worry about the gas station attendants, who are breathing it for eight to twelve hours a day. Eventually, Elon Musk, et al. will mostly solve that problem, but in the mean time, he keeps postponing the delivery date of my CyberTruck.
When this benzene claim was made before I thought it incorrect. There is no reason to suspect mineral spirits has benzene in it. So I analyzed some. I did not detect any with a detection limit that would detect any amount that should worry us.
I don't fret about a few molecules of benzene one might get to absorb in their body from filling a gas tank.
"Prevent" is the wrong word. "Decrease" is more appropriate, and that assumes the equipment is installed, properly maintained, designed correctly and turned on. If you can smell the gasoline, or any of it's components, it is being released into the atmosphere, wherefrom it can be inhaled.
Its in the last paragraph of the article, and it was what first occurred to me while reading down to the final paragraph. While not definitive, it does seem quite likely.
Background: While "activists" wail that no amount of XXX is acceptable in YYY .....etc. the fact is that toxicity is dose related. When I worked providing data to FDA the agency was uninterested in anything present below 20 parts per billion, ppb. Few if any chemicals were toxic at this level.
Two things have come together. First, modern analytical instruments can detect vanishingly small quantities of chemicals like benzene, orders of magnitude less than 20 ppb. To get tenure, or otherwise recognition at your university, junior faculty must get their name in print to show they are doing something. An easy route is to find some chemical that the public knows about at any concentration in some place the public cares about.
Be certain that the work was done to get some person's name in print and not for the purpose of saving the world from benzene. Where did the benzene come from in deodorant? I don't know. Seems improbably unless there is a petroleum solvent in the formulations, or something was misidentified as benzene when it fact it was something else. I'll bet with enough effort arsenic and uranium can be found in deodorant.
I think you are out of date on some of this stuff. This is not 1972. Science PhDs today are a dime a dozen. An academic has to do a lot more than get his name in the paper to get tenure or even to get a job.
Also a chemical does not have to be toxic to be harmful. Constant exposure to small amounts can be deleterious.
Having one's name as a primary investigator on many scientific papers does indeed drive prestige and name recognition in academia, at least on the scientific end of it, and THAT is what brings in grant money. In academia as well as the private sector, money is what makes the world go 'round. The academics prefer to think its all about knowledge, but if you watch their behavior (as I have been doing for the last 20 years) it is all about grant money, whether the funding is public or private. Private funding is actually much more desirable from what I've seen. One paper won't do it, but you'd be amazed at the functionally incompetent professors I've met who continue to get funded based on their publication history more than visionary ideas. In fairness, I've known others who get funded based on genuinely good ideas and on very rare occasion, a history of the combination of good ideas and meticulous and careful execution of their work (those individuals are very rare however, and truly impressive people with whom to work).
The trouble is, this is not relevant to the discussion - the study was done by a private company for reasons of their own - financial and prestige driven, yet not likely to be academic reasons. Stock sales driven by media buzz, mergers driven by prestige, or a lucrative buyout to shut up the investigator are more the mark with privately funded, news generating research like this.
On the other hand, why would anyone expect NOT to find traces of nasty solvents in aerosol products? The stuff is propelled by combustible gasses like propane and butane for heavens sake! I'm not in the least bit surprised that they found some benzene in there too, I'm actually surprised that it took so long for someone to look and that anyone thinks this is earth shaking as discoveries go. You wouldn't be surprised to find it in spray paint, why be surprised by finding it in spray deodorant?
I've never seen the point of making a product one can wipe on more complicated by making it a spray. Benzene and propellants aside for the moment, do you really want deodorants or insect repellent going up into your sinuses? Never seen the appeal of these products, personally, and any potential harm from the un-necessary propellants just adds to that reaction.
With something like spray paint, aerosol application has a purpose, so the propellants and extensive contamination can be worth it for the results. I usually brush instead when durability is the desired result, but every now and then a smooth, nice finish is the driving goal and the rattle can comes out.
). Do what's right for your own comfort level and laugh off all those others who think you're the one who's nuts.
