On Wed, 21 Nov 2001 GREYTRUNK@aol.com wrote:

> Just a thought or two on the subject.  Do you get methylhippuric acid tests 
> done on a regular basis to test for overexposure to Xylene?  Xylene could be 
> the culprit in two possibilites--(1) overexposure to xylene and (2) 
> decomposition of xylene-- xylene decomposes, interestingly enough into lots 
> of things, including carbon monoxide.

Please could you explain these metabolic events, especially
CO formation from decomposition of xylene (which doesn't
have any O atoms in its molecule). Isn't The formation of 
hippuric acid from benzoate a classical example of
detoxification? We did this expt when I was a 2nd year
medical student, drinking about 300 ml of nasty-tasting
sodium benzoate and collecting nearly all of it as
hippurate in our urine about an hour later. 

In the title of my reply I've changed "depravation"
to "deprivation."  This isn't pickiness. The deprived
get (and IMHO deserve) much more sympathy than the
depraved. 

----------------------------------------
John A. Kiernan
Department of Anatomy & Cell Biology
The University of Western Ontario
London,  Canada   N6A 5C1
   kiernan@uwo.ca
   http://publish.uwo.ca/~jkiernan