Someone who is around a smoker inhales more benzene, a cause of leukemia, than he or she would inhale spending the same amount of time filling a car with gasoline.

CNN: Is secondhand smoke really that risky?

He also prepared period paints, thinned with benzene to accelerate drying.

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He said second-hand smoke contained more than 4, 000 chemicals, including benzene, formaldehyde, arsenic, ammonia and hydrogen cyanide.

BBC: NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Legal threat over passive smoking

The bank's internal communications chief, Ray O'Rourke , has a background in crisis PR from his days as an executive at Burson-Marsteller, where he represented Pan Am Airlines in the Lockerbie air disaster and Perrier in its more recent benzene fiasco.

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