Wow.
It bothers me that those posts were deleted.
As a lapidary I deal with airborne particles, very, very fine dusts are created when grinding a gemstone on a 100,000 grit diamond wheel. In our industry a lot of people died young from inhaling these dusts, so people covered their faces, it helped a little.
Then they added wetting systems and people stopped covering their faces, they thought there was little or no particles to inhale because you couldn't see big clouds of dust, they were wrong. It has been shown now that the water can actually make the situation worse, spreading particulate much farther, making it harder to clean or vent away, trapping more dust particles in the droplets of fine mist crated by the diamond laps and wheels spinning at high speeds, and depositing them in the lungs more effectively, at least with dry dust you breathe some out. Obviously we are breathing out much of the vapor but I worry the same effect could happen in a case like this.
There is a reason why asthma meds are vaporized, highly effective delivery to the lungs.
I still see lapidary forums where they discuss working with dangerous minerals and they say, "always grind wet, if dry wear a respirator" no mention of using one when wet grinding a dangerous arsenic-bearing mineral like malachite. Drives me crazy.
A mentor of mine in gem cutting who was also an accomplished chemist said "trust me, you don't want to inhale aerosolized cerium oxide (a fine powdered polishing compound) more than once or twice in your life, and surely not for hours a day."
And the MSDS for cerium is a cake walk compared to titanium dioxide.
Titanium dioxide: "Mutagenic for mammalian somatic cells. TERATOGENIC EFFECTS: Not available. DEVELOPMENTAL TOXICITY: Not available. The substance may be toxic to lungs, upper respiratory tract. Repeated or prolonged exposure to the substance can produce target organs damage."
So basically if you think you aren't inhaling insoluble particles because it is vapor, you are mistaken.
It just blows my mind that someone making a product MADE to be inhaled and nothing but inhaled repeatedly and preferably for a long period of time would allow something like titanium dioxide to get in the product in even trace amounts, let alone a major ingredient added by choice, and for coloring!?
I hate when people say things like this but I am going to say it now, this type of incident is exactly what the banners need to paint our community as a bunch of crazy yokels with no sense whipping up dangerous products meant to be ingested with no ingredients list, no oversight.
One incident like this could crush our whole community and ruin a lot of responsible juice makers.