An online pharmacy company that also conducts independent testing of consumer products has detected benzene in several sunscreen products.
The company, Valisure LLC, has issued a petition to the Food and Drug Administration in the US to enact stricter rules regarding the presence of benzene in sunscreen products.
Benzene is a colourless or light-yellow liquid chemical at room temperature. A widely used chemical, it has been used primarily as a solvent in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries and is a known carcinogen. Trace levels of benzene may be found in cigarette smoke, gasoline, glues, cleaning products, and paint strippers.
The FDA has forbidden the intentional introduction of the chemical into commercial products due to its toxic properties. The agency does, however, allow benzene-containing products to be sold if the product provides a “substantial therapeutic advance”, on the condition that levels in the product are at or below 2% and that the introduction of benzene into the product is unavoidable. Currently the agency has no guidelines regarding benzene levels in sunscreen products.
Over the past several years, Valisure has become a respected name in product testing—they were behind efforts to have the carcinogen NDMA removed from heartburn medications in 2018, and more recently led the effort to recall hand sanitizers that contained benzene. In 2020, they detected NDMA in metformin, leading to widespread product recalls.
In this new effort, the company tested 294 unique batches from 69 different companies. They found significant variability from batch to batch, even within a single company. Fourteen lots of sunscreen and after-sun care products from four different brands contained between 2.78 – 6.26 ppm of benzene; 26 lots from eight brands contained detectable benzene between 0.11 – 1.99 ppm; and 38 lots from 17 brands contained detectable benzene at < 0.1 ppm.
There was no detection of benzene in an additional 217 batches of sunscreen from 66 different brands through initial analysis of at least one sample.
The company also noted that some of the products they tested had levels that were higher than the 2% cap mandated by the FDA. They also noted that since most of the products they tested did not have any detectable amounts of benzene, it clearly is not an unavoidable byproduct of production. The FDA recently discovered that sunscreen chemicals can be readily absorbed through the skin, they added.
Their petition asks the FDA to ban any amount of benzene in sunscreen and after-tanning care products and issue a recall for those that have measurable levels of benzene that have already been sold. They have also published a table [PDF] that lists sunscreens brands with no detectable levels of benzene in them.
Source: Medical Xpress
