Formaldehyde is extremely harmful to the human body. You need an air purifier to improve the indoor environment.

Recently, some media published an article with the title "Alibaba P7 employee died of leukemia and rented a formaldehyde room in Ziroom", saying that an Alibaba employee named Wang rented a room in Ziroom in Hangzhou in January this year. Just six months later, he contracted acute myeloid syndrome. Died from leukemia. For a time, the topic of whether formaldehyde can cause leukemia quickly hit the circle of friends again. After all, moving to a new home or renovating an office are problems that everyone will encounter in life. Everyone has more or less heard of formaldehyde pollution caused by decoration, but how harmful is formaldehyde and what is the relationship between it and leukemia? What kind of relationship it has is not something ordinary people can tell clearly.

Indoor formaldehyde mostly comes from new furniture and floors. To talk about the relationship between formaldehyde and leukemia, we must first understand what formaldehyde is. According to Hao Fengtong, former chief physician of the Department of Occupational Diseases and Poisoning Medicine at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital Affiliated to Capital Medical University, formaldehyde is an aldehyde with a small molecular weight. It is colorless and has a pungent smell in its gas state. It is a commonly used chemical raw material and is mainly used to produce industrial resins. , such as particleboard and paint, are often found in building materials.

"People are concerned about the main source of formaldehyde in home or office building decoration. For example, adhesives are used in wooden floors. After decoration, they usually buy new furniture, and there are also adhesives in these newly purchased furniture. It’s about the mixture,” Hao Fengtong said.

In fact, formaldehyde is widely found in nature and is found in the air. However, it is not very stable and can be easily oxidized or metabolized by microorganisms in the soil. Formaldehyde is also produced in the human body. It is an amino acid metabolite. The blood of humans and other primates contains about 1mM of formaldehyde. But don’t worry, the human body has a certain ability to metabolize formaldehyde, so trace amounts of formaldehyde will not accumulate.

Since the molecular structure of formaldehyde is relatively basic, it is the precursor of many complex compounds. In the textile industry, for example, in order to make clothes anti-wrinkle, some reactive resins containing formaldehyde are used as adhesives; and in the automobile manufacturing industry, building materials industry, etc. It is widely used in various industries.

On the other hand, formaldehyde has bactericidal ability and can kill most bacteria and fungi, so its aqueous solutions and derivatives are also used to disinfect and treat certain diseases, and are even used to make animal feed.

Formaldehyde is also known by another name. An aqueous solution with a formaldehyde mass fraction of 37% or a volume fraction of 40% is what people often call formalin. Formalin is often used to prepare specimens. This is due to a special property of formaldehyde - it can irreversibly bind proteins to DNA, so it has the function of fixing tissues and preserving them.

Air purifier manufacturers said that when most people think of formaldehyde, their first impression is "the pungent smell during decoration." In the air with a formaldehyde concentration of 0.1 ppm, people will feel obvious irritation to the mucous membranes of the eyes. Inhaling formaldehyde at this concentration may cause headaches, burning sensation in the throat, difficulty breathing, and can trigger or aggravate asthma symptoms. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) lists formaldehyde as a "known human carcinogen" related to sinus cancer and nasopharyngeal cancer, and the National Toxicology Program released the "Carcinogen Report (Twelfth Edition)" in 2011. Formaldehyde is specifically listed as a "known human carcinogen."