biosafety_first

I appreciate all the responses, thank you.

Hi all, I'm a molecular biologist who is worried about exposure to chemicals in spite of taking safety measures. Particularly, I worry about being exposed to chloroform and methanol. Perhaps those of you who work with these chemicals or are knowledgeable can enlighten me. Right now I went down a spiral of scary studies and MSDS warnings and I'm truly freaking out. I used to work with small amounts of chloroform (about half a ml) placed on cotton. Even though I performed the experiment in the fume hood, which takes about a few minutes, I disposed the cotton outside the fume hood after I'm done. My supervisor suggested that I let the chloroform evaporate first, and then throw away the cotton into the biohazard bag. I could sometimes perform the experiment 10 times, so then I'd have bunch of chloroform cotton in the biohazard bag outside the fumehood. Even though the garbage was far away from where I stood, I realized that I could smell chloroform once in a while, so then I started accumulating the cotton inside the fume hood in a container before disposing of the container. My worry is that because I could smell chloroform once in a while, maybe I was constantly exposed to low levels of chloroform for a year. A similar scenario happened with methanol. I had to wash some equipment outside the fume hood with methanol. Luckily, I didn't do this very often, but again there were times I could smell it. At all times my skin was protected, but obviously, I inhaled these chemicals. Is there anyone who also experienced something like this? Is this dosage enough to cause any harm?