Formaldehyde Causes More Cancer Than Any Other Toxic Air Pollutant

> The EPA noted that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which the agency paid to review its report, agreed with its decision not to include myeloid leukemia in its cancer risk. But four former government scientists with experience doing statistical analyses of health harms told ProPublica that the myeloid leukemia risk calculation was sound.

Sigh.

> A 2003 study showed that factory workers exposed to high levels of formaldehyde were 3 1/2 times more likely to develop myeloid leukemia than workers exposed to low levels of the chemical.

Well maybe this study they linked to will be a slam dun...

| Conclusions: Exposure to formaldehyde may cause leukemia, particularly myeloid leukemia, in humans. However, results from other investigations are mixed, suggesting caution in drawing definitive conclusions.

Scanning a recent review article seems to say the same thing - epidemiology studies appear mixed.

Maybe formaldehyde causes cancer at rates the EPA had previously estimated, maybe it doesn't. I don't know. What I do know is this article is a disappointment.

That shows you geniuses are not born: it's environment, man. Where can I get these buttons today for my children?

I've sworn off particle board in my shop decades ago (for reasons having nothing to do with formaldehyde) but quickly added cheap Chinese plywood to the exclusion list.

I have resigned myself to opening my wallet for the expensive stuff (that costs over $100 for a 4' x 8' sheet, Europly, etc.). Europly at least seems to be formaldehyde free.

> Formaldehyde Causes More Cancer Than Any Other Toxic Air Pollutant. Little Is Being Done to Curb the Risk.

HCHO = formaldehyde

So yeah it's starting to be phased-out little by little but there is definitely the same exposure in here.

Apparently it tastes sweet.

I'd also add that decades ago before any EPA reports I'd learned in chemistry that formaldehyde was a dangerous substance and not to breathe its fumes. That said, I have not read the EPA reports so the questions I raise here may be superfluous (if so, then the reports deserve a wider audience).

Second, there are a number of issues about formaldehyde that are missing from this story that I consider important for the following reasons:

(a) What are the tolerable (accepted) levels of formaldehyde that a human can accept without harm? Restated, in a 'pristine' preindustrial era how much formaldehyde would a human experience from external sources, the environment etc., and how do they compare with the levels we experience nowadays? Moreover, do we actually know the typical level of formaldehyde in a 'pristine' environment (given its ubiquity one can imagine small amounts coming from many different sources).

(b) Re the 'pristine' environment, does science know if exposure to levels of formaldehyde from external sources is actually toxic? If so, then how would intermittent dosing versus chronic exposure at those levels mitigate matters?

(c) The article does not mention that a metabolite of methanol is formaldehyde and that it's a principal cause of methanol's toxicity.

Right, just about everyone knows methanol is very dangerous and that very few consume it intentionally (or accidentally) and those who do either end up dead or blind but I raise the matter here because the human body continually produces small amounts of methanol as a result of digestion, ipso facto, so too formaldehyde (which is then further metabolised to formic acid). As with ethanol, the body uses its liver enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) to metabolise methanol, so that would seem to indicate there's a threshold or tolerable level to both of these alcohols which does not cause harm (at least so in most individuals).

Question, is this unavoidable internal source of formaldehyde dangerous and is its level in the body known to be carcinogenic or not? Rephrased, is it known if internally-produced formaldehyde does actually cause cancer, if so are some individuals more prone or susceptible to developing cancer from exposure (clearly not eveyone is; alternatively, most don't live long enough to succumb from it alone)?

(d) Do we know if the effect of the combined amount of formaldehyde from both external ('pristine') and internal is dangerous of not?

(e) If the combined effects (of 'd') are negligible on say all but a small percentage of the population who perhaps is susceptible, then what level of formaldehyde is typically experienced in our modern industrial society? What I'm trying to establish here is how much more formaldehyde does the average person now experience over and above the 'natural' baseline and whether a threshold level exists, and if it does then have we put error bars on those graphs?

(f) Additionally, the article does not mention the fact that there are some 'foods' that intrinsically produce formaldehyde as part of their metabolism, for instance the artificial sweetener aspartame (as such it could be avoided). Given say a normal or nominal intake of aspartame how does the level of formaldehyde it produces compare with those levels mentioned above, and are they comparable and or relevant? (Yes, I'm well aware of the long ongoing and painful debate over aspartame and the general consensus that its effects on health are essentially negligible or irrelevant (in that its formaldehyde metabolite is both small in quantity and quickly eliminated from the body).

Right, I've driven these points home to the point of tedium because such stories are not very informative, I'd even suggest that they contribute to the public's unease and general disquiet over chemicals, per se.

It's all very well for learned papers to appear in the pages of Nature et al but whilst they rightly preach to the cognoscente there's precious little that's pitched between their high level and the unsatisfactory low level of this article.

I don't know the answers to the questions I've posed but I'd suggest that if science writers were more precise and if they took the matters I've raised to heart then both the lay public and those in technical fields not directly allied to the subject matter would be much better informed.

https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/vaccine-ingredients/...

Do these people even do research? Due to RFK Junior this is the 1st time that USA actually has someone in charge that already has done something about it in the past and is now in even better position to do something about it.

With that in the background, I'm struggling to distill this article into a "so what". The article suggests the EPA limit is one incidence of cancer in a million people per lifetime. If they've underestimated the risk from formaldeyhyde by one or two orders of magnitude I'm still not seeing what the problem here is. Odds of prostate cancer in men is double digits over a lifetime. This seems like something of a non-issue. If anything, if formaldehyde is industrially useful, the EPA is probably doing the right thing bending the rules. We literally don't know how to sustain modern society without some deaths from industrial processes.