July 15, 2021 — Shoppers ought to cease utilizing sure manufacturers of spray-on sunscreen merchandise made by Johnson & Johnson. The corporate has issued a voluntarily recall after discovering low ranges of benzene, a identified cancer-causing agent, in some samples.
Benzene isn’t an ingredient of sunscreen, and shouldn’t be current in these merchandise. The degrees detected had been low and wouldn’t be anticipated to have an adversarial impact on well being, however the firm says it’s recalling the merchandise anyway “out of an abundance of warning.”
The sunscreen merchandise which have been recalled are:
- NEUTROGENA® Seaside Protection® aerosol sunscreen,
- NEUTROGENA® Cool Dry Sport aerosol sunscreen,
- NEUTROGENA® Invisible Every day™ protection aerosol sunscreen,
- NEUTROGENA® Extremely Sheer® aerosol sunscreen, and
- AVEENO® Defend + Refresh aerosol sunscreen.
These merchandise had been distributed nationwide by means of quite a lot of retail shops. Shoppers ought to cease utilizing these merchandise and throw them away, the corporate stated.
On the identical time, it emphasised the significance of utilizing different sunscreen merchandise to guard the pores and skin from extreme solar publicity, which might result in skin cancer together with melanoma.
Johnson & Johnson has launched an investigation into how benzene bought into these merchandise.
One of many firm’s different spray sunscreen merchandise, Neutrogena Moist Pores and skin, was not included within the recall.
A number of weeks in the past, benzene was found in 78 widely-used sunscreen products in assessments carried out by the web pharmacy and laboratory Valisure A lot of the merchandise had been aerosol sprays, and the corporate known as on the FDA to recall all of them.
That petition advised that the discovering of benzene was the results of contamination someplace within the manufacturing course of.
“This is not a sunscreen subject, it is a manufacturing subject,” stated Adam Friedman, MD, professor and chief of dermatology at George Washington College. “We do not need these issues to be blurred.”
There’s a threat that individuals take away the incorrect message from these findings.
“Individuals have already got ambivalence about sunscreen, and that is simply going to make that worse,” Friedman stated in an interview on the time.
He identified that benzene is current in automotive exhaust, second-hand smoke, and elsewhere. Inhalation publicity has been the first focus of toxicology investigations, as has publicity from issues corresponding to contaminated ingesting water – not through topical utility. “We do not understand how successfully [benzene] will get by means of the pores and skin, if it will get absorbed systemically, and the way that then behaves downstream,” he famous.
Alternatively, ultraviolet radiation is a well-established carcinogen. Avoiding an efficient safety measure corresponding to sunscreen may show extra dangerous than publicity to hint quantities of benzene, he stated.
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