Bad Buys: I Thought I Had The Cancer Sunscreen
Valisure is a pharmaceutical lab that does quality control for medications, analyzing their chemical composition for potential contamination or toxins, and this week they identified benzene, a carcinogen often responsible for luekemia, in 78 popular brands of sunscreen. The FDA, which dictates regulations for both sunscreen and hand sanitizer, puts a strict limit of 2 parts per million on the latter product, but does not have posted guidance for sunscreen. But some of the sunscreens that Valisure studied had benzene above 5ppm; thrice the limit for the only other topical medication that the FDA regulates.
I did not buy the cancer sunscreen. The Neutrogena lotion that I use has no detectable benzene. But, if I had purchased the spray version of this product, I would have been subject to 6.23 ppm of benzene. Ouch.
The American Academy of Dermatology Association, the largest dematological organization in the world, favors a recall of all identified sunscreen. They also call for the FDA to set a benzene concentration limit for sunscreen. It remains to be seen what the FDA will do. Since the FDA does not currently set an upper limit on benzene in sunscreen, but rather states vaguely that no drug should include benzene unless benzene is unavoidable in the manufacturing process, it is not clear if Neutrogena broke the law. Valisure thinks they did: since they identified numerous other sunscreens without benzene, Neutrogena and other manufacturers did not need to expose consumers to this carcinogen.
What a clown-car crash. And the FDA is supposed to be the one protecting us consumers. It reminds me of my favorite The Onion article.
Faith in medicine is at a complicated crucible. With the mRNA COVID vaccines, we have collectively experienced a monumental leap forward in the medical sciences, with highly effective mRNA vaccines for the novel coronavirus available within 8-months of its discovery. If that doesn’t put your faith in medicine, in the human animal, I don’t know what will. I literally tear up sometimes thinking about these vaccines and all of the marvelous scientists who brought them to this world, and all of the millions of lives they saved. I think that the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines may be the most important medical advancement of my lifetime, and possibly the most important one since the erradication of smallpox in 1980. mRNA vaccines look like they’re about to produce the first viable malaria vaccine, a vaccine whose global impact will dwarf even the vaccines for COVID-19.
But I’m not someone that needs to be convinced by science. In it, I put my faith readily. I work in medical software and, through circuitry and databases rather than cells and DNA, I have done important work to improve medical care through technological advancement.
But then there’s sunscreen with benzene in it. There’s John Oliver selling sexual healing blankets. There are scam artists masquerading as credentialing boards in order to license quacks, thus giving them the veneer of credibility.
And there’s Hbomberguy’s masterpiece of a video delineating the origins of the anti-vaxx movement. A towering video essay, the length of a feature documentary, Hbomberguy traces the entire anti-vaxx movement as we know it to a single disgraced doctor who faked medical data and created a fictitious disease all in order to sell people an alternative vaccine that he had patented. It was all, literally all of it, a lie based on money.
And that’s what underpins all of these lies. Money, money, money. Money warping any possible truth in medicine so that it’s hard to really say what’s good and what’s bad for us. Money is, to medicine, a fucking venom.
I shall probably be writing about this more in the coming weeks. Let’s see if we have a cure for medicine. Let’s hope it’s not terminal.