Vinyl Chloride in Cigarettes

By Terry Martin, About.com Guide

Updated September 18, 2012

About.com Health's Disease and Condition content is reviewed by our Medical Review Board

Toxic Secondhand Smoke

iStockphoto

See More About

What Vinyl Chloride is:

Also known as chloroethylene, ethylene monochloride, or monochloroethylene, vinyl chloride is a flammable clear gas or a liquid with a mildly sweet odor. Vinyl chloride is a man-made product. It does not occur naturally in the environment.

What Vinyl Chloride is Used For:

Until the mid-seventies, vinyl chloride was used in a variety of consumer products, including cosmetics, and as a propellant in aerosol cans. It was also used as a coolant.

Today, vinyl chloride is most commonly used to make a polymer called polyvinyl chloride (PVC). PVC is found in various plastic products, including wire insulation and packaging materials.

Vinyl chloride is also used in the manufacture of cigarette filters.

How Vinyl Chloride Gets Into the Human Body:

Vinyl chloride most commonly enters the human body through inhalation:

Breathing air close to hazardous waste sites / landfill areas where plastics industries dump waste products.
Breathing the air in a contaminated workspace where plastics are produced or used.
Breathing cigarette or cigar smoke.

Less commonly, vinyl chloride can be ingested when a person drinks water from a contaminated well.

The Health Risks of Vinyl Chloride:

The health risks of exposure to vinyl chloride depend on a number of factors:

The amount the person was exposed to.
The frequency of exposure.
The length of each exposure.
The type of exposure; inhalation or ingestion.

Other factors that should be taken into account include whether there were other chemicals present that the person was exposed to, their age, sex, diet and overall health.

When vinyl chloride enters the bloodstream, it goes to the liver, where it's then converted into other substances.

Vinyl chloride itself typically leaves the body within a day via the urine, but the substances produced in the liver take longer to exit the body. Some of these substances are more hazardous to human health than vinyl chloride because they react with chemicals normally present in the body and change how they are used / responded to physiologically.

Vinyl Chloride and Cancer:

Vinyl chloride may increase the risk of developing a number of cancers, including:

The U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, The International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the U.S. Environmental Production Agency have all recognized vinyl chloride as a known human carcinogen.

Vinyl Chloride and Cigarettes:

Vinyl chloride can be found in both firsthand and secondhand smoke in low levels, typically 5 to 30 nanograms per cigarette (a nanogram is 0.000000001 gram).

Studies of long-term exposure to vinyl chloride in animals has shown that cancer of the liver and mammary gland may increase when very low levels of vinyl chloride are present in the air (50 ppm). While we do not know how much inhaled cigarette smoke it takes to manifest the health hazards of vinyl chloride, we do know that it contributes to cancer and is unhealthy to breathe in any quantity.

Sources:

_{Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry - Centers for Disease Control. Vinyl Chloride. http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp20-c1.pdf. Accessed September 2012.}

_{American Lung Association of Idaho. What are You Smoking? http://radar.boisestate.edu/pdfs/WhatAreYouSmoking.pdf. Accessed September 2012.}