I'm working – or trying to work – on a book about the history of poisonous food. Strangely enough, this leads me to the subject of formaldehyde. Yes, this famously toxic compound was once a widely used food preservative. In fact, meat products sent to the front during the Spanish American War were reputedly so heavily dosed with formaldehyde that some Army officers accused food manufacturers of doing more harm to soldiers than did enemy troops.

Formaldehyde was a well-known and well-used compound by then, discovered by the Russian chemist Alexander Butlerov in 1859; mass-produced in Germany for commercial use as a disinfectant in 1889. But by the turn of the century, scientists were beginning to realize that the very qualities that made it an organism-killing disinfectant also made it dangerous in terms of exposure.

I've been gathering such information with the help of a talented journalism graduate student, Kate Prengaman, at the University of Wisconsin, and I thought you might appreciate a note she recently sent me on the subject:

The first careful scientific analysis on the danger of formaldehyde as a toxin was conducted in 1900 by a physician named Martin Fischer. He wrote up a short summary in 1900 for the Journal of the Boston Society for Medical Science, and then a more complete description of the agony formaldehyde inflicted on animals in 1905. In one of his experiments, Fischer subjected guinea pigs and rats to formaldehyde gas similar to standard room fumigation procedures, and then after euthanizing the animals, looking at the lung damage caused by breathing the formaldehyde fumes.... "Wow – Fischer was morbidly thorough. He really kills a lot of animals, in a lot of terrible, painful ways, but in doing so he seems to prove his point without a doubt. Formaldehyde is toxic. Seriously. And this guy dissected a lot of hemorrhaging animals to prove it. Seriously – 35 pages of it. So trust me – don’t inject formaldehyde into your lungs, your abdominal cavity, your muscles, or pretty much anywhere else in a living creature. Don’t even splash it in your eyes." (JEM, Fischer, 1905)

Why am I telling you about the "embalmed beef scandal" of the Spanish American War and this gruesome series of experiments done more than 100 years ago? Because both occurred to me when I was reading Nicholas Kristof's Sunday columnabout the apparent efforts of the chemical industry to suppress damaging information about formaldehyde and its risks to human health. And my first thought was that Big Chem – as Kristof likes to call the industry – has obviously done a really bad job for a really long time at hiding the dangers of formaldehyde from the rest of us. How else to explain the fact that there's a veritable library of toxicity documents at our disposal?

May I say first that I've read other Kristof chemistry columnsthat bothered me more, mostly ones that were so vague about chemical risks that you almost could end up believing that the carbon (C) in your coffee was somehow eying you with evil intent. This piece at least identifies the issue at hand – formaldehyde and styrene, their carcinogenic potential (more on that later), and maneuvering by the American chemical industry to slow down or suppress publication of scientific reports on that topic.

But the suppression argument would be more impressive if we hadn't known for decades that industrial formaldehyde formulas, for all their many uses, are also poisonous chemistry. If indeed we believe there's a conspiracy to hide the bad health effects of formaldehyde, let's at least call it an incredibly inept one. And let's consider the wealth of detail on the hazards of formaldehyde available to anyone who's ever used Google. To name a few:

A fact sheet from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration that details formaldehyde toxicity information and worker safety regulations concerning formaldehyde, including a recent series of warnings concerning "hair smoothing formulas."

Afact sheet from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on indoor air quality and the risks posed by formaldehyde emissions from resins used in pressed word products. (This formulation is usually referred to as urea formaldehyde.)

A fact sheetfrom the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that links to numerous other resources and highlights risks to workers in the embalming business (a subject also under discussion in the late 19th and early 20th century).

And also a "Formaldehyde and Cancer Risk" fact sheetfrom the National Cancer Institute that reviews much of that very information that the chemical industry is supposedly hiding from the rest of us. It notes that formaldehyde has been classified as a known human carcinogen by the International Agency on Research on Cancer and by the U.S. National Toxicology Program in its 12th Report on Carcinogens, published last year. It's the latter report that is actually the focus of Kristof's column.

As he describes it, the chemical industry responded to the 12th report by successfully lobbying for a follow-up study on formaldehyde and styrene and then persuading "its pals in Congress" to delay funding for the 13th report until that study is completed. The manufacturer's group, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) has countered by saying that the report contains such flawed formaldehyde science that lengthy further evaluation is required and that the process itself needs further review. There's a very clear explanation of why this makes actual sense from Emily Willingham at Forbes, who like me is not a conspiracy theorist in this case.

But Kristof does make a valid point about appearances. The report deals with a lot of other compounds besides formaldehyde; there's nothing convincing about a delay of an entire publication when it would be easy enough to just acknowledge that these studies were under review. It's not that ACC has actually suppressed the relevant information – all out there in stacks – but the council has successfully made itself look, let's say, somewhat shady.

On the other hand, Kristof's oversimplification of the formaldehyde issue offers an clear example of why chemical manufacturers tend to be, let's say, somewhat wary. Throwing out the word "carcinogen" without making any effort to explain that the research involved is tricky, complicated, and often contradictory is just playing the chemophobia scare card.

If you read the NCI analysis, you realize that these studies involve occupational health situations rather than people with the occasional piece of pressed-board furniture in their homes – as Kristof implies. And that even establishing the risks to industry workers is a step-forward-step-back process. To quote just one example: "A cohort study of 11,039 textile workers performed by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) also found an association between duration of exposure to formaldehyde and leukemia deaths. However, the evidence remains mixed because a cohort study of 14,014 British industry workers found no association between formaldehyde exposure and leukemia deaths."

As the terrific chemistry blogger Puff the Mutant Dragon emphasizes, this has never been simple territory. Formaldehyde occurs naturally in nature (our own bodies make trace amounts) and just like pressed wood furniture, solid wood furniture can also generate trace emissions. The post, which includes a very smart look at emission levels, is titled "Danger: NYT Columnist Nicholas Kristof is Emitting Formaldehyde."

And in some ways playing the carcinogen card over-complicates the issue. We know, unambiguously, that too much formaldehyde exposure is dangerous. As OSHA puts it in that fact-sheet I cited above: "Short-term exposure to formaldehyde can be fatal. Long-term exposure to low levels of formaldehyde may cause respiratory difficulty, eczema, and sensitization." Note that this represents still more information readily available to the public.

History tells us that Big Chem is only part of the story. The rest of the tale belongs to us, a culture that has long enjoyed the convenience of just the compounds that we love to hate in opinion pages of The New York Times. If we want to change that, if we wanted to be smarter about our chemical dependencies, we could start with the lessons we've had at hand for quite some time.

Images: 1) Tissue in formaldehyde solution Stadkatze/Flickr 2) Formaldehyde/Wikipedia