Can one really say that it's "mostly" its "relation with embalming fluid" that makes it scary... in a comment containing the line "at least 30 children had died two years prior due to use of the preservative"?
Also I want to be careful not to allow lethality to be seen as coextensive with poisonousness. Non-acute effect is kind of the name of the game with additive-type doses. The bulk of the misery caused by "lead poisoning" has nothing to do with people who hit an LD50-type threshold.
But we are missing the counterfactual of how many lives were saved due to the antibiotic effects of safe amounts of formaldehyde (previously mentioned two drops of formalin). Pasteurisation dropped infant deaths by 2/3rds, so it is quite possible that overall the addition of formaldehyde saved many lives (hard to tell without more study of whatever facts are available).
Nonetheless, the pasteurization movement was gaining steam. In 1909 Chicago became the first American city to enforce a compulsory milk pasteurization law, despite strong opposition at the state level. After vehement back-and-forth editorials, prolonged political maneuvering, and a typhoid epidemic blamed on raw milk, New York’s commissioner of health followed suit in 1914 with the enforcement of a previously adopted ordinance. Seven years later the city’s infant mortality rate dropped to 71 deaths per every 1,000 births—less than one-third of the rate in 1891.
Disclaimer: I am an armchair scientist, so I know nothing about the subject beyond my few searches. I am just trying to follow up on a “fact” that seems to be very biased. Even in modern times with strict standards and far far better systems of protection and antibiotic interventions, raw milk causes problems:
Raw milk and raw milk products can be contaminated with bacteria that cause serious illness, hospitalization or even death. From 1998 through 2011, 148 outbreaks due to consumption of raw milk or raw milk products were reported to CDC. These resulted in 2,384 illnesses, 284 hospitalizations and 2 deaths. Most of the illnesses were caused by E. coli, Campylobacter, Salmonella or Listeria. A substantial proportion of the raw milk-associated disease burden falls on children; among the 104 outbreaks from 1998-2011 with information on the patients' ages available, 82% involved at least one person younger than 20 years old.
Also I want to be careful not to allow lethality to be seen as coextensive with poisonousness. Non-acute effect is kind of the name of the game with additive-type doses. The bulk of the misery caused by "lead poisoning" has nothing to do with people who hit an LD50-type threshold.