Oh, maybe this article won't be another questionable attempt at reporting something related to science...
> 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.
I think that's the wrong line of reasoning. Even if the science isn't 100% settled, you're in a scenario where it's possible if not probably that formaldehyde is major carcinogen. Maybe futures studies say it's not quite as bad as they think, maybe it's worse. The question is how much certainty does the EPA need before it takes action? Should they let people continue to breath in toxic chemicals because it's possible they're not as toxic as we think? Surely they have to be prepared to act on incomplete information sometimes.
Is the objective to ensure people are safe from potential dangers? Sure.
Is the objective to maximize profits for capitalist society and minimize costs? Then banning every useful but potentially harmful substance that isn't proven to kill people is a drag on society.
I'm not even joking. It sounds horrible but policy makers are always making such trade offs. The "scientific", "evidence based" language is just used to placate the masses from realizing this fact.
Isn't this what actuarial science is? Surely the boffins at the EPA can model potential outcomes and weigh potential environmental downside against the economic downside. Including factors like how replaceable is formaldehyde and are the known substitutes even worse.
Vehicle tires are a deep, integral part of daily economic and socio-economic activity.
Deeper than even cigarettes used to be (in North America). There was a time when people couldn't imagine a day without a cigarette. Now think about a future state where living without a personal motor vehicle is both a sane and practical choice.
It will similarly take a long time to combat vested interests and change consumers' habits.
> Vehicle tires are a deep, integral part of daily economic and socio-economic activity.
We should be careful not to let perfect be the enemy of good, such as mandates to reduce tire wear[1] and elimination / substitution of the most harmful tire additives.[2][3]
A lot of it is self inflicted wounds. Americans thanks to the car can live like 30-40 miles from work and have an acceptable commute. Thats hard to do in a timely fashion on public transit anywhere, which seems to work best up to a 5-15 mile radius or so. People have to be willing to live closer (and often it is cheaper to live close to the center of town as that is where the recent immigrant minority populations find their cheaper housing, than in the newer construction suburbs full of doctors and lawyers and private schools).
Taxing the previously subsidized usage of those roads is a start. See NYC's recent starter congestion tax. It still has a long way to go, but we can certainly improve the world slowly!
People who are driving there are likely doing so in a way that allows them to either absorb costs or pass them on to others.
Kansas City, for example, does not have a workable public transit system. If you charge a congestion tax to reduce traffic on interstates, it means real pain because there is no alternative.
There are far more Kansas Cities in the US than there are New York Cities.
Yeah people seem to think that driving costs up for driving will change behavior and build infrastructure. The reality is it will just hook the local government or authority to the tax.
Well sure, if you're now sneaking in the qualifier that the costs are marginal. But obviously there is some price at which people do change their behavior.
> Now think about a future state where living without a personal motor vehicle is both a sane and practical choice.
I interpret this to mean "a future state in the US", since there are many places all over the world, where it is already sane and practical to live without a car or motorbike or similar vehicle.
American roads and streets are crazy wide, due to standards set in the 1950s. This created more sprawl. OTOH it also provides a lot of room for adding bike lanes. E-bikes can then replace most local driving.
With particulate counts from heating and car exhaust falling from better filters and increasing electrification, tyre dust is bound to get more spotlight in the coming decade. Especially in Europe and Asia where the inner city isn't just a place for poor people and offices with air filtration.
I daresay that the bigger problem with tyre dust is that lots of it gets washed into rivers and waterways whenever it rains. Some of the proprietary tyre chemicals (e.g. 6PPD) have been shown to be extremely toxic to fish, so this is yet another pressure that we're putting on our environment.
But we only care about that when it ends up in fish we eat. The fish are dying anyways from overfishing. And even when the fish we eat are full of microplastic we seem to be able to mostly ignore that. Eating fish is a personal choice and all that.
I wish we cared about the rivers and oceans, but as a group we seem to mostly hope that enough bacteria will evolve to eat that stuff. Getting people to do something about the air we breathe is a lot easier (and even then change is slow and with a lot of opposition)
I don't really see it as a choice between water and air as we're utterly dependant on both for the survival of humans.
I think we're behaving like a room full of monkeys that are just throwing shit around and hoping that not too much ends up on ourselves. We can't continue to do that forever.
Or it could be that people spend more time in their luxury vinyl planked house, vaping and having ingress air filled with formaldehyde from traffic
It'd make more sense and be less ethical to expose people to either formaldehyde or tire dust in a confined area, but that study is definitely not getting funded
Modern construction is insanely "tight" in the sense that most of the inside air stays in and most of the outside air stays out. Some of the most energy-efficient buildings need convoluted ventilation systems to prevent the humidity from getting out of whack and causing mold.
My older house might leak conditioned air like a sieve, but it's also venting away the various VOCs from whatever cheap crap I have recently brought inside.
AFAIK, the ventilation systems are only convoluted in the sense that they use a heat exchanger to minimize the temperature difference with the incoming fresh air. It’s not a hack or afterthought: The idea is that airflow is very important, but it needs to be controlled to maximize energy efficiency.
Relying on passive ventilation that wasn't designed as such is also not a good way to achieve removal of these nasties. You can see that if you open a window when you have high CO2 - it doesn't drop at any speed.
Relying is the important point. Sure, it may be fine, but it often isn't, and probably is uncomfortable in winter. And that's before we get to energy losses.
Is not just traffic, Biologists are exposed to formaldehyde vapors each day for example, and gloves don't remove it entirely so you end having skin problems.
Interesting related fact. Some plants like Spathiphyllum are known to remove formaldehyde from the air. This does not eliminate the need of a proper strong ventilation system, but indoor plants helping to protect people from cancer should be in each lab, for good measure.
>In research designed to create a breathable environment for a NASA lunar habitat, noted scientist Dr. B.C. Wolverton discovered that houseplants are the best filters of common pollutants such as ammonia, formaldehyde, and benzene.
I licked PF (phenol formaldehyde) buttons when I was a toddler. I can't forget the fascination with the bitter, tongue-numbing, medicine-like taste that they released when wet.
That shows you geniuses are not born: it's environment, man. Where can I get these buttons today for my children?
IDK, but I knew a guy who claimed he solved his own learning and developmental problems as a teenager when he accidentally put his head against live mains wires meant for a light fixture.
(Details in case someone wants to reproduce: it was in Poland and before 2004, so the voltage between the wires was 220V AC.)
Electro shock therapy is used for some psychological conditions today. Those who perform it are good at telling everyone else that "one flew over the cuckoo's nest" (book 1962, movie 1975) is nothing like what really happens.
He worked at a local electrical supplies store. He sold me my first soldering iron and taught me a bit about tinkering with analog electronics. I've lost contact with him after he left that job.
Interesting but rare. I knew of a guy who, as a child, was electrocuted at high voltage; he survived but remained stuttered and twitchy for the rest of his life. There are cases of acquired savant syndrome that after some kind of concussion they develop some special abilities, it's all accidental of course and cannot be replicated. Some examples Derek Amato, Orlando Serrell, Jason Padgett
> remained stuttered and twitchy for the rest of his life.
That's an amazing time constant. He should have gotten a job as an electrolytic supercap. Audiophiles doing single-ended stuff would have loved him. He could probably pass signal down to a fraction of a Hertz into an 8 Ohm load.
There are a few documented cases of traumatic brain injury (of various forms) actually fixing mental problems. They're very rare, but it happens every now and again.
I casted a inch-length semi cylindrical pendant out of old school solder and wore it around my neck on the bare skin for few days. I eventually stopped because I wasn't feeling to great after sleeping with it for some nights. I'm curious how it affected me. I noticed that my character changed to more anxious around that time and it stayed like that ... but it might have just been an effect of going through puberty.
Not particle board (as mentioned in the article) but sheets of inexpensive Chinese plywood I picked up had a very strong formaldehyde smell. I had never smelled that in plywood before (or at least so strongly).
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.
There's laws at least in Sweden(and new EU directives incoming that might tighten them up even more) that forbids selling plywood with offgassing higher than a certain level, so it's probably not totally free of it but should be within safe levels.
The problem with the current EU-wide rating system is that it assumes the interior is ventilated as required by other regulations. Furniture materials are assigned an emission class (E0, E1, E2) based on the steady-state VOC concentration in the test chamber (EN 717-1 and others).
Virtually no home manages to hit the minimums for ventilation (25 m³/h per person, IIRC), especially during winter. So even though an E1-class particle board is labeled as safe with regards to VOC emissions, in practice the room will reach far higher pollution levels than that category allows.
It also doesn't control for the amount of material present, so you can have a small properly ventilated room covered floor to ceiling with E1 particle board furniture, but achieve E2 or worse VOC levels in the air.
Backstory: former employer spent $$ to integrate a VOC sensor into their residential HVAC/HRV solution. The idea was to increase ventilation when odors are present and reduce ventilation when the air was clean again. The engineer prototyped and tested the device in their pre-war home (brick, stone, old wood). All good. They had the first batch manufactured and sent out to customers in brand new homes full of modern materials (engineered wood, vinyl flooring etc). The sensors were permanently saturated (reading maximum VOC value) and the project ended up being canceled, because newly built homes were their entire customer base.
When we ripped out the carpet to install luxury vinyl flooring it was off-gassing for weeks. Had to go over the vinyl with dozens of microfiber clothes before the outside coating stopped wiping off.
Imagine all of the people cutting into that inexpensive wood without air filtration is terrifying
What is luxury vinyl like? I can’t imagine vinyl being luxurious, but my personal taste is fairly hippy slanted so I tend to just ignore synthetic materials for anything pricey.
It's not "actually luxurious" so much as "it looks a lot less bad than old linoleum rolls" while still having high durability. Like how every new apartment is "luxury."
I would never use anything else in a kitchen or bathroom - it looks pretty good, feels nice on the feet, doesn't care about a few spills, and if you drop a plate you have a chance it won't break. However for other rooms give me real hardwood.
Depends on how much you spend in it. And especially how much you spend in the underlayment for how it feels under your feet.
Even in expensive homes in my area it's common because it has a lot of nice properties. Homeowners will pay $15/sq ft, which at that price you could get a real wood floor installed, for LVP that looks pretty realistic, is easy on your joints due to the nice underlayment, and is basically as indestructible as a tile floor.
It's bonkers to me how well my LVP flooring has held up to the abuse my dog gives it. It still looks brand new 5 years later, while the solid wood used for the steps between levels began showing visible wear only a few months after installation.
> while the solid wood used for the steps between levels began showing visible wear only a few months after installation.
The wood used matters, and the way it's finished matters a lot, with hardwood floors. You can get anything between amazingly-resilient and scratches-badly-if-you-look-at-it-funny, depending on how it's finished.
Lots of contractors cheap out on the finish, and pre-finished hardwood is pretty much always bad.
You sparked my interest so I looked it up. Plywood in the US comes predominantly from China and Vietnam. I'm surprised I figured due to it's size and density it'd be mostly a local product
A hair dresser I went to years ago switched to working out of her home instead of a salon because she said she was concerned about formaldehyde exposure. She told me Brazilian blowouts and other treatments and dyes have heaps of formaldehyde.
One reason for the prevalence of all kinds of eco/hippie/etc hair salons is that many hairdressers develop allergies against all the chemicals they're working with.
That reminds me of hearing about the problems that Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit films amongst others) had with getting/keeping plasticine artists - after a while they develop an allergic reaction to plasticine.
Well, if you prefer, there was an indigenous American culture that needed to carry water in leaky natural materials and discovered that this worked a lot better if you coated the inside of a waterskin with tar.
They were wiped out by some combination of tar consumption and the rest of their lifestyle.
I would suggest that industrial society is less prone to this, mostly because it's larger-scale. There's always someone doing something that will ultimately prove to be a bad idea. You can't know until you try. What you need is to be able to recover from trying.
The scale will make the inevitable collapse much more spectacular than any previous one in recorded history. I don't have any strong opinions on tar containers but I doubt it's any worse than whatever people are consuming every day on their food because of ubiquitous use of pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides. Add a few more carcinogens from regular industrial pollution and those natives could be considered to be practically living in paradise compared to their modern counterparts.
Considering that I have tar flavoured cheddar in fridge(not great). And could get tar flavoured candies from store... I think there is probably lot worse things...
> Considering that I have tar flavoured cheddar in fridge(not great).
Why did you buy such a thing and also, who makes tar flavoured cheddar (and why)?
Personally, I do enjoy a bit of nettle-wrapped Cornish Yarg and there's quite a few cheeses that use ash (Kidderton Ash and Morbier are lovely), but I wouldn't want tar with my cheese.
Bitumen paint for the inside of concrete water tanks is still a thing.
I don't use it for that, but I have used it as a barrier layer on outdoor timber objects, like fence posts, DIY planters and shed floors.
TVOC reacting to ethanol is a feature, not a bug. Ethanol vapors if up close, such as releasing slowly from a foam surface, can cause sinus irritation and a headache. It tells me that I need better ventilation, if only temporarily.
The device is a singular combination meter of both TVOC and HCHO. It is widely sold on Amazon.
First, I'll preface this comment by saying that I'm neither a toxicologist nor a medical researcher. Moreover, I don't doubt the evidence that formaldehyde is carcinogenic.
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.
Your rant was great. It leads one to ponder, among other things - ants. They produce formic acid. Ants like to live under houses, especially in the late summer. How much formaldehyde fumes do they produce? Does it come up the cracks in your foundation?
(Formaldehyde is also a preservative - but that's for another day.)
I've no idea how much ants produce but your point just adds to the key issue which is that the baseline(s)/thresholds for safety must be determined before substantial progress can be made. For that, let's check the environment humans have evolved in over many millennia.
Failing that or if we find there is enough formaldehyde from natural sources to cause us harm—and or if we determine human sources cannot be reduced to safe levels—or that it's completely impracticable to so (which on evidence seems likely)—then I'd reckon that at some futue time we may have to resort to gene editing or such to make our species more resilient to formaldehyde (that is in ways somewhat akin to how vaccination works today).
I don't think that's a stretch too far or that we're at risk of becoming Frankenstein-like humans; after all that claim could be made now about vaccination, it forces the strengthing of our immune systems to defend us in ways well above our pre-vaccinated state.
Of course, that approach would also apply to many other harmful chemicals and diseases. Right, for now that's just speculative science fiction but I've little doubt that eventually it'll happen.
> 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).
Or fruit. Pectin has methoxy groups, which are degraded to methanol, which is metabolized to formaldehyde.
"Culling the weak" is what a dictator-for-a-day does first? Surprised pikachu face
I am glad that I do not live in a country that is number 50 in every important metric, but citizens say "we are best".
Does an article about regulation of a toxic chemical that would dead-certain already be far more heavily regulated if not for industry lobbying need to be political? Is that the question?
You'll find that Republicans and deeply conservative people also care, quite deeply, about pollution and cancer.
You just have to learn to speak to them... And if you build consensus and mutual interest, they won't fight your agenda when the Democrats and intense liberals win an election.
>> Still, if the past is any guide, even the limited efforts of President Joe Biden’s administration are all but guaranteed to hit a dead end after Donald Trump is inaugurated.
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.
There is a previous four year experiment so, yes, this people did research and had clear results pointing to that trend.
All of this people claiming that, "but, but Trump will experience an epiphany overnight to became the opposite that he was until today", are just lying to themselves and in denial. Have you, as me, seen the Dr Oz put in power?.
There is a worldwide movement against science, and we see always the same faces parroting the same lies. Last week in Spain the PNfV tricked the government to have their congress in the Spanish senate. Seeing a former Spanish minister denying the evolution and promoting the "cretinist" theory from the senate was an absolute shame
I can't help but reflect that everything causes cancer. I was reading the other day about the influence of hot tea on throat cancers, for example.
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.
The tea thing seems to be really only for drinking it while it's still extremely hot (over 60° C) and the few studies showing any link are mostly from places where there are many other factors (like high smoking rates, frequent exposure to things like smoke from open fires used for cooking etc.).
It's very unlikely that there is almost any real risk from hot tea, as long as you let your tea cool down to a reasonable temperature (especially compared to a risk factor like smoking).
> We literally don't know how to sustain modern society without some deaths from industrial processes.
Of course we do. It would just reduce profits. Individual workers accept these risks under the hope that they can eventually improve their or their families lot in life.
No, we can't. Not every material or chemical has an entirely safe replacement. PPE isn't perfect. Let's say all industrial workers wore air-tight safety suits, then the suits themselves would still be somewhat toxic.
I think you're moving the goalposts. You invoked deaths directly attributable to industrial process. Are there recorded deaths from long term wearing of a positive pressure suit? And why exactly would that be "somewhat" toxic? Is it "somewhat" lethal then?
Ultimately, though, probably just going to end up using robots. These typically aren't highly skilled labor positions.
> I think you're moving the goalposts. You invoked deaths directly attributable to industrial process.
Directly or indirectly, industrial processes are always going to be somewhat dangerous. TFA is discussing indirect deaths due to formaldehyde.
> Are there recorded deaths from long term wearing of a positive pressure suit?
Not that I know about, but then again I wouldn't be surprised if there were deaths due to equipment failure and suffocation. The materials used in them certainly contain various low level carcinogens.
> And why exactly would that be "somewhat" toxic? Is it "somewhat" lethal then?
Point is it's balancing risks. It isn't lethal directly at levels used in many industrial processes, but exposure over a long time does increase cancer risk and fatality risk. Then again so do many other common materials.
> It isn't lethal directly at levels used in many industrial processes
Other than production itself. I was assuming that was our starting point. The TFA mentions some sources but does not limit exposure to only these indirect sources, nor does the EPA study.
> but exposure over a long time does increase cancer risk and fatality risk
Which is relative to the actual industry. The plants where formaldehyde is produced is likely highest in danger. It's also somewhere that you can easily see some changes in production process could actually measurably save whole numbers of lives within the next decade.
Likewise since it's produced and added intentionally to glues and finishes it's entirely possible it could be eliminated from the supply chain particularly in products that diffuse it out poorly before reaching the customer. Where not possible the products could be held and treated in such a way to extract and filter out the compound.
It's just weird to go "well.. the first world apparently requires human sacrifice" especially in the face of so many options. Anyways.
One point on this - formaldehyde fumes from furniture will make anyone in the room sick, regardless of any long term cancer. It’s got a distinctive odor, causes lung and eye irritation in any significant quantity, and generally just really sucks to be around long term.
It’s been really nice having it phased out for indoor uses.
> 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.
reply