I wish that when I was a student of anatomy I could have argued my way out of dissecting stinky cadavers – and I would have had a friend in Jennifer Sass, an alarmist who blogs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. She sounds off on a recent report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which discusses health concerns regarding formaldehyde. Ms. Sass has a real issue with Lumber Liquidators, a commercial flooring company, which came under fire after an expose by 60 Minutes last year. The program revealed that some of the company’s laminate wood flooring manufactured in China contained an unsafe level of formaldehyde, which is a “known carcinogen.” That claim is consistent with the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the same group that claims bacon is as likely to cause cancer as smoking. In 2009, IARC concluded that “there is sufficient evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of formaldehyde. Formaldehyde causes cancer of the nasopharynx and leukaemia.” Read more.
