About Formaldehyde: How Formaldehyde is Used

When you wash your hair or brush your teeth, you’re using toiletries that are made safer because they are preserved against the growth of bacteria.

Formaldehyde has been routinely used for decades in hundreds of products. Some of them touch your body every day and you don't even know it. Many different resins are created from formaldehyde. These resins in turn are used to create other compounds having different properties. These compounds can be used as preservatives in personal hygiene products because they kill bacteria or used to make other products more effective in terms of foaming action such as soaps and detergents. These products improve your hygiene and subsequently your health.

The science behind the use of this simple molecule is extensive. Chemistry has allowed the responsible use of formaldehyde in all kinds of every day products such as plastics, carpeting, clothing, resins, glues, medicines, vaccines and the film used in x-rays.

The very first times that you encounter formaldehyde as a child, you don’t know it, but it's the medium in which you receive vaccinations for childhood diseases. These include diphtheria, polio and influenza, to name a few.

Formaldehyde probably makes its first lasting impression during biology class when young students dissect their first frogs. Other students may be presented with fetal pigs for dissection. In either case, the animals have been preserved with formaldehyde to ensure that the organ systems remain intact for anatomical investigation. It’s also used to preserve cadavers for use by medical schools in teaching human anatomy.

Along with the memories of that first dissection many students also remember the pungent smell that accompanied their first wielding of a scalpel. That smell is the preservative formaldehyde. It has been used for tissue and organ preservation for more than a century and has greatly assisted biological science. By preserving tissues, organs and entire bodies, the teaching of science is spread throughout the world.