Sunday, July 30, 2023

"You make me sick!"

Perhaps literally. "some people claim that their skin gases provoke allergy-like reactions in people in their near vicinity." The linked study says that the people in question seem to have higher levels of toluene.
When active smokers smoked a single cigarette, within 15 min, toluene was detected in skin samples collected immediately after the smoking event, together with numerous tobacco-specific chemicals, including nicotine, 3-methylfuran, 2,5-dimethylfuran, and 3-ethenylpyridine12. ... However, the emission amounts of these chemicals in the PATM group were considerably higher than those in the non-PATM group: approximately 12 times for 2E1H, 39 times for toluene, and four times for m,p-xylene on average.

Years ago I was mildly curious about what would be needed to study human odors down to very low concentrations, but not curious enough to dig in to find out what people were actually researching. Quite a lot, it turns out. My naive search must have used the wrong keywords.

1 comment:

  1. "The man was a bilious attack to me, an ague, a cough, a dropsy." -- A surviving fragment of Plautus' Frivolaria

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