There is not much doubt that studies like this have an impact on the public perception of e-cigarettes. Even though cigarettes result in 480,000 American deaths each year — and even though it is the tobacco, not the nicotine, that kills them — many in the public health community treat e-cigarettes as every bit as evil. Every dollop of news suggesting that vaping is bad for your health, much of which has been overblown, is irrationally embraced by anti-tobacco activists. One result is that, whereas 84 percent of current smokers thought e-cigarettes were safer than ordinary cigarettes in 2010, that number had dropped to 65 percent by 2013.

Worse, close to a third of the people who had abandoned e-cigarettes and returned to smoking did so because they were worried about the health effects of vaping, according to a study published last year in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.

The Portland State study fits right into this dynamic. It is, on the one hand, factually true that vaping at an extremely high voltage will cause formaldehyde-releasing agents to develop.

But this conclusion is highly misleading. People don’t vape at a high voltage because it causes a horrible taste — “a burning taste that occurs from overheating the liquid,” wrote Konstantinos Farsalinos, a Greek scientist and vaping expert, in an email to me. Farsalinos has done human studies of vaping and discovered that above a certain voltage — lower than the high voltage test on the Portland State study — people simply couldn’t inhale; the taste was unbearable.

Indeed, the study actually conveys good news. When used at normal voltage, vaping does not produce formaldehyde! “Rather than scaring people about the dangers of vaping and alarming them to the ‘fact’ that vaping raises their cancer risk above that of smoking, we should instead be regulating the voltage and temperature conditions of electronic cigarettes so that the problem of formaldehyde contamination is completely avoided,” wrote Michael Siegel, a professor of public health at Boston University, on his blog. But given the way the Portland State authors characterized their research, it’s no surprise that headline writers took away a different message.