The metabolism of benzene differs from that of other aromatic hydrocarbons; the excretion of phenol in the urine of workers exposed to ambient benzene bears a linear relationship to the degree of exposure. A semi-quantitative screening test using stable reagents not requiring special apparatus or laboratory facilities permits an estimation of urinary phenolic bodies, and hence the exposure to b...

This study presents levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) measured indoors for the first time in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and quantifies health risk children emphasizing urgent need to improve control indoor VOCs sources. The 583 samples collected at 144 sites, including new buildings, old apartments, schools, workplaces, kindergartens, baishin, Mongolian traditional gers, hospitals, shoppi...

OBJECTIVES Main purpose To evaluate the feasibility of a measurement-based assessment of benzene exposure in case-control studies of paediatric cancer; Additional aims To identify the sources of exposure variability; to assess the performance of two benzene biomarkers; to verify the occurrence of participation bias; to check whether exposures to benzene and to 50 Hz magnetic fields were correla...

The urinary benzene metabolites, trans, trans-muconic acid (ttMA) and S-phenylmercapturic acid (SPMA), are widely used as benzene exposure biomarkers. The influence of the glutathione S-transferase (GST) genetic polymorphism on the excretion levels of urinary ttMA and/or SPMA has been investigated. The association between dose-related production of urinary benzene metabolites and benzene exposu...

BACKGROUND Benzene is a widely distributed environmental contaminant known to cause leukemia, particularly acute nonlymphocytic leukemia, and perhaps other hematologic neoplasms and disorders. Few epidemiologic studies, however, have been able to address relationships between the extent of benzene exposure and the level of risk. PURPOSE A large cohort study was carried out in China to evaluat...

Abstract A framework of "Common Criteria" (i.e. a series of questions) has been developed to inform the use and evaluation of biomonitoring data in the context of human exposure and risk assessment. The data-rich chemical benzene was selected for use in a case study to assess whether refinement of the Common Criteria framework was necessary, and to gain additional perspective on approaches fo...

Grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulations have been performed to investigate the localization and adsorption behavior of benzene and propylene, which are involved in the cumene synthesis process, in purely siliceous MWW zeolite (ITQ-1). From the mass clouds of GCMC simulations, it can be seen that the benzene and propylene molecules show different localization and adsorption behavior in th...

Benzene is a ubiquitous air pollutant that causes human leukemia and hematotoxic effects. Although the mechanism by which benzene causes toxicity is unclear, metabolism is required. A series of articles by Kim et al. used air and biomonitoring data from workers in Tianjin, China, to investigate the dose-specific metabolism (DSM) of benzene over a wide range of air concentrations (0.03-88.9 p.p....

A retrospective cohort study was conducted in 233 benzene factories and 83 control factories in 12 cities in China. The benzene cohort and the control cohort consisted of 28,460 benzene exposed workers (178,556 person-years in 1972-81) and 28,257 control workers (199,201 person-years). Thirty cases of leukaemia (25 dead and 5 alive) were detected in the former and four cases (all dead) in the l...

Benzene is one of the basic building blocks of organic molecules. One of the reasons for benzene’s ubiquity is its unusual ring structure first discovered by Kekulé in 1865. In this paper, we show that a simple symmetry-based analysis can narrow down possible benzene structures to three ring ones, including the Kekulé’s ring. Thus, Kekulé’s benzene structure provides a good pedagogical example ...