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by rchiba 1845 days ago
I found this article through a friend of my wife's who is a skincare expert.

Check your cabinets. I actually found the Neutrogena lotion that we use in the table of affected products!

List of affected products: https://www.valisure.com/wp-content/uploads/Valisure-Citizen...

List of unaffected products: https://www.valisure.com/wp-content/uploads/Attachment-A-Tab...

5 comments

The offending stuff > 2ppm in the list is mostly sprays. With I think one exception none of the offenders are zinc oxide, either.
Note that the list of affected products has several tables with different levels of severity:

– Table 2. Benzene detected at 2 ppm or higher.

– Table 3. Benzene detected at 0.1 ppm to 2 ppm.

– Table 4. Benzene detected at below lower limit of quantification (LLOQ).

Yikes. Had a bit of a scare: living in Puerto Rico, I regularly use Walgreens SPF50, Neutrogena sunblock and After Sun gel.

The closest UPC was the After Sun, but mine was a couple of digits off.

Makes you think what stuff you're putting on that you don't know about!

How are things in PR these days? I can't imagine what it must be like to deal with a pandemic while simultaneously trying to rebuild basic infrastructure.

Have you been able to get back to some semblance of normalcy yet?

Things are pretty alright over here! Most of the island has recovered since the 2017 hurricane, the remaining damage (at least in the metropolitan area) is road signage and some screwed up power lines here and there.

The virus has been under control as well. We’re slowly going back to normalcy. Case numbers are dropping and so are deaths. The vaccination campaign is working.

TLDR: Things are getting better :)

Not OP, but I lived in PR for 2 months, got back to NYC for a month and now back to PR. Things are getting back to normal here, vaccination rate has accelerated rapidly, and the island just ended its year-long curfew:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-ends-nightly...

Infrastructure-wise, frankly... I don't see any construction work, whatsoever. Biden released 1bn funds for Puerto Rico 2 months ago, so I'd suppose that money is now being readied for spending.

Neutrogena's had crazy high amounts compare to the lower level ones-- hundreds of times more benzene, up to 6ppm. For reference, even 0.5ppm over a long period of time significantly increases cancer risks: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5946455/
Next question:

Why would anyone trust that 100% of what's in vaccines is fully declared on the labels?

(In this article, Neutrogena is being accused which is part of Johnson & Johnson which produce one of the Covid vaccines available.)