Chemical Statistics

Substance Count Updated by Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), which is part of the American Chemical Society

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Chemicals in combinations of two or more can create a synergy, making the toxicity significantly higher than any of the individual chemicals. Other factors that need to be considered along with the combinations of chemicals are environmental conditions such as: humidity, light, temperature, the individual's body, and all the rest of the world surrounding all of us. Without studying all things together, very little will be resolved about toxicities. In other words, the number of experiments that would be needed would be significantly larger than those already extremely large numbers. Needless to say, there is no government or combination of governments that is capable of checking just the possible combinations of chemicals, let alone all possible variables. The precautionary principal must be invoked, and the production of many or most toxic chemicals must be halted.

Possible combinations of two or more chemicals if:
Number of chemicals in commercial production are between 87,000 and 100,000. For this example, we have used the lower estimate of chemicals in production.

Therefore there are:
Approximately 1.063725377 x 10^86,991* different combinations of two or more chemicals that could have a possible synergistic effect on toxicity

* equals 10 followed by 86,991 zeros.

Stats for the CAS registry as of 9mar03: