Originally Posted by
Ty Williams
I'm actually quite curious why, when the correlation of exposure to particulates in the same size range as we're dealing with in woodworking leading to respiratory diseases like COPD in other industries is so well documented, do you feel wood dust is somehow special and doesn't cause respiratory problems?
My wife works in medical research, so one of the nice things is being able to access all the journals for free plus being able to get her to get me the email addresses of other doctors at her institution that are studying things I'm interested in. I've gone through MANY odd an exhaustive searches on weird topics via her access (the oddest probably being the safety of tungsten carbide wedding rings in trauma incidents). When I started having problems with wheezing and being out of breath after working even briefly with dust-generating tools, I hit the literature. I didn't find anything saying wood wasn't dangerous. I found almost nothing saying wood was dangerous (other than some noted allergens like walnut and some known-toxic woods). What I found was a stunning lack of real research about woodworking specifically. I found a lot of studies about other fine particles from sands, paints, fillers, primers, stones, coal, plastics, etc, etc. All of them universally found that small dust particles produce big health problems is a statically significant portion of the sample population. So, with the confirmed data that particles in the size range and concentration range home woodworkers experience can cause illness, and lacking any data to conclusively show wood particles are exempt from this, why would you conclude it's all a scam?