If you have walked into a new house and smelled that 'new house' smell, you are now ingesting a carcinogen, according to the report. Let the lawsuits begin. The issue is formaldehyde and they say, as they also said about carcinogens in their previous 11 reports, that the science is clear, but it turned out that the science in second-hand smoke was more cultural politics than data and the risk from tanning beds in cancer is the same as in cell phones and drinking coffee.
Why list these, and six others, at all then? The NIH spends a lot of money on this toxicology program so they have to issue something, I suppose, but making lawyers rich over obscure chemicals like styrene seems silly. Styrofoam is not giving you cancer. Obviously if you work in a chemical factory, or for that matter a mortuary, and don't use caution, you are increasing your risk of cancer but placing it on a carcinogen list will send people into a panic. Organic food has killed more people this month than the chemicals on this new list have killed in the last decade.
The American Chemistry Council, as you might expect, is not pleased. "We are extremely concerned that politics may have hijacked the scientific process," said Cal Dooley, president of the ACC. And costs are sure to spike for consumers even though the consumer products have little risk. Needlessly expensive products that have replacement chemicals could be even worse. Progressive government insistence that your couch be unable to catch fire led to the addition of PBDEs and then replacements for those which are just as bad and now California children have seven times more flame-retardant chemicals in their blood than kids in other countries - all to prevent a couch fire problem that was slight in the first place. Thanks for that. MTBE in California gas was the darling of environmentalists who cared about emissions but it ruined groundwater and ethanol is the most ridiculous non-environmental environmental boondoggle of the last 20 years that created a problem worse than the one it solved but was supposedly good science, according to then Vice President Al Gore and 100 percent of environmental groups throughout the 1990s.
I have a bottle of Korean Soju in my cupboard. It's unopened. I would never drink the stuff, though Koreans do, because it contains formaldehyde and I don't want to be embalmed just yet.
I had no interest in drinking Soju but now that it is even more forbidden I kinda want to. Like much of the alcohol in my cabinet and a great deal of the data used by activist groups, it is from the 1990s and therefore you should consume at your own risk.
But like in those replacement examples above, the chemicals in ULEF (ultra-low-emitting-formaldehyde) or NAF(no added formaldehyde) and CARB (California Air Resource Board - the same group that exaggerated emissions by 300% to get a political solution passed) compliant materials will cost more and be no help at all since they are solving an obscure problem - or perhaps be even worse than the problem they are fixing.
If after reading this far you are not in enough of a panic about Styrofoam giving you cancer when you open an Amazon box, also get set to watch out for these remote carcinogens: Captafol - a fungicide that isn't even sold in the United States; Riddelliine - get your desert-grazing cows an attorney because that's one place a plant exists that contains, though some natural medicine herbal concoctions use Senecio longilobus which contains it, and herbal medicines are suspect anyway, since we next come to; Aristolochic acids - still used if you buy herbal crap from the Internet that is made overseas but even more scientifically forgiving countries like Germany banned it in real products; Glass wool fibers like in insulation are too tenuous to actually be linked to cancer but it made the list anyway. Don't sleep on your insulation, regardless.
More importantly, though, is not to drink beer in China. 95% of their beers contain formaldehyde but the Chinese are not moving to expensive beer any time soon. I am being a little critical but it's not to say the Toxicology Program does not have some good insights; they have Mustard Gas on the list of carcinogens, for example, and thousands of World War I soldiers agreed, but sunlight being a carcinogen tells you that the criteria are a little fuzzy.
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