Tulane Wood Dust Study - "wood dust is bad for you" is a lie?

[Matt King]

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"A major study of the effects of wood dust on mill employee respiratory health has found "no statistically significant adverse effects from wood dust at the facilities participating in the study," according to Sharon Kneiss, vice president of regulatory affairs at the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA). The six-year study, which followed more than 1,100 employees from 10 wood products industry plants around the country, was commissioned by AF&PA and 18 other wood products trade associations, including APA. The study was conducted by the Tulane University Medical Center."
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A Google search on "Tulane Wood Dust Study" will give many results referencing this study. This quote listed above is from the American Plywood Association site.

Here's another, from Lisa Harbatkin of Wood Digest - "Solid wood dust is not a respiratory danger to wood workers at levels measured in plants participating in the recently completed Respiratory Health Study of the Wood Processing Industry."

Is it just me, or does this study (or at least the general conclusions drawn from it) seem to contradict everything we've (as a group) always understood about the dangers of wood dust?

Inquiring minds want to know.....

Dustfully yours,


Matt

[Chris Dodge]

I know of people that have developed allergies to wood because of wood dust...at least that is how it is assumed they developed the allergy.

My recommendation is to keep the dust collectors going and keep the masks on.

[Lee DeRaud]

Key words in that quote are "at levels measured in plants": these guys have orders-of-magnitude better dust collection than the average hobbyist.

[Guy Boulianne]

Key words in that quote are "at levels measured in plants": these guys have orders-of-magnitude better dust collection than the average hobbyist.

You're Rigth.

May i Cite Bill Pentz's text here:

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My doctor, a fellow woodworker and pulmonary (lung) specialist helped and pushed me hard to learn what went wrong then share what I learned along with my personal solutions to provide protection. He says testing of thousands of small shops as they apply for commercial licenses shows small shops with indoor dust collection equipment consistently test with five to twenty times higher than government allowed maximum airborne dust levels. My shop with the top recommended cyclone and fine filters tested over the eight hour government maximum with the parts per million particle counts surging to over 12,000 times medical recommended maximums
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Maybe the plants are not ALWAYS in the allowed range, but they have to be the closest they can at the most workstation they can....

[Ian Barley]

I take a simple view of these things.

If I work my table saw for 2 minutes with no DC running I sneeze like mad and end up coughing.

Sneezing and coughing are reactions that nature has given my body to deal with foreign bodies likely to have a deleterious affect on my health. If my bodies semi-autonomous reactions are telling me that something is bad for me I don't care how many studies you point to - I trust my body.

With my DC gear going I can work all day without a cough or sneeze. Simple conclusion in my mind.

[Frank Pellow]

I take a simple view of these things.

If I work my table saw for 2 minutes with no DC running I sneeze like mad and end up coughing.

Sneezing and coughing are reactions that nature has given my body to deal with foreign bodies likely to have a deleterious affect on my health. If my bodies semi-autonomous reactions are telling me that something is bad for me I don't care how many studies you point to - I trust my body.

With my DC gear going I can work all day without a cough or sneeze. Simple conclusion in my mind.

Well said Ian! I certainly trust my own body's reaction to dust a lot more than a study which appears to be funded by the American Forest & Paper Association.

[Jeff Bratt]

Exactly right - read the articles or look at the study itself - not the headlines. The study was conducted by an industry council to resist any tightening of current regulatory limits for wood dust. Their conclusion was that the current limits 15 mg/m3 for total dust and 5 mg/m3 for respirable dust should not be lowered to proposed limits of 1 mg/m3 (inhalable fraction) for all species except Western red cedar, and 0.5 mg/m3 as the limit for Western red cedar. However, there were adverse health effects noticed in some instances - the study attributed these to mold in the wood being processed - so that wasn't a "wood dust" problem.

Do NOT draw any conclusions that "wood dust is not harmful". The headlines associated with reports on this study are blatant lies:
"Breath Easy: Wood Dust is Safe"
"Tulane Wood Dust Study Finds No Adverse Respiratory Health Risks"

There are heath risks - even at the current exposure levels - and since many home shops are wildly above the current OSHA limits, dust collection should still be a concern to all of us. Notice that exotic woods are barely mentioned and exposure to some of these can be significantly more dangerous than the common species studied.

[lloyd morris]

I don't know about the study Matt, but exposure to wood dust and the resulting allergies, asthma and pneumonia almost killed me last year. Visit Bill Pentz's website for an eye opener about the dangers of wood dust.

As far as the study goes I would look at who funded it and who stands to benefit from test results which are contrary to a rational person's good judgement. Problems from long term exposure to wood dust can also take years to begin to show up and by then the damage is usually done.

There is a lot to be said for good dust collection at the source and hopefully these plants have excellent dust collection cababilities. Most of them are way better than the systems we have in our shops.

Hope this helps,

Lloyd Morris

[Don Baer]

Matt,
I presently work in the Industrial Health and Safety field as a product manager. Part of my job is to recommend instrumention that is used to measure things like airborne particulate matter so I read the report with great interest. The way I read it the study realy had to do with are the allowable levels of airborne particulate safe or do the need to be changed. The industry standard today for a worker 8 hour exposure is set at 5 mg/m3. There was some talk of lowering the standard to 1 mg/m3. this would cost the industry about $1B/year to achieve. What the Tulane study said was that the present limit is safe.

What I can't find out and no one is talking about is the size of the particulate and what the alowwable concentration should be for small particles. This is talked about in other studies just not wood dust. Here is my concern. There are 3 threshold that are used as measuring stick for particulate size. the first threshold is 10 micron (called PM-10) the second is 2.5 micron (PM-2.5) and the third is 1 Micron (PM-1).
Any thing bigger then PM 10 will not make it through the respetory tract to the lungs. PM-2.5 particles are so small that the can be trapped in the lining of the lungs. And PM1 particle are so small that they are absorbed directly into the blood stream. I think that as a minimum we need to find out the concentration of particulate is in these lower and smaller sizes before we say we are safe enough. Unfortunatly the average hobbiest as a great many of us are don't have the where with all to find this out. I will do some testing in my new shop (my present setup has no dust collection ) when it is set up and if anyone is interested will post the results if anyone is interested.

[Jim O'Dell]

Matt,...... snip
..... Unfortunatly the average hobbiest as a great many of us are don't have the where with all to find this out. I will do some testing in my new shop (my present setup has no dust collection ) when it is set up and if anyone is interested will post the results if anyone is interested.

Don, I, and I think a lot of others, would be very interested in the measurements you take at your shop! If no one else wants to know, please hang on to my note and PM me the results!! Thanks. Jim

[Maurice Ungaro]

"A major study of the effects of wood dust on mill employee respiratory health has found "no statistically significant adverse effects from wood dust at the facilities participating in the study," according to Sharon Kneiss, vice president of regulatory affairs at the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA). The six-year study, which followed more than 1,100 employees from 10 wood products industry plants around the country, was commissioned by AF&PA and 18 other wood products trade associations, including APA.


Folks....FOLLOW the MONEY. Look at who funded the study. Need I say more?

[Bart Leetch]

Around home when we heard something like this that we didn't believe we always said ya & their eyes are brown too. Meaning they are full of it.

I am getting to where I'll be wearing a mask & Ear protection more of the time I'm in the shop. Ear protection for sure because in talking to my Dad he is on his RD pair of hearing aids the latest costing $6000.

[Lee DeRaud]

Folks....FOLLOW the MONEY. Look at who funded the study. Need I say more?

While I agree in principle with that sentiment, I think it applies more to studies that say "X is good, you should buy a whole bunch of it" or "X is bad, you need to pay us big bucks to fix it". It's not like they're trying to sell us sawdust or talk us out of buying DC equipment.

For that matter, who else is going to fund a study of this?

[Louis Rucci]

Just to be a Devil's advocate.

You can't always ignore the report because of who funded it. They may have a valid reason for the study, good or bad, and it's up to us whether to trust the results or not.

[James Ayars]

Art, thanks for your post, specifically points 1 and 2. When I was in grad school, I saw that almost all research funding was from public and private corporations. While the departments of education and sociology got government money, the sciences rarely did. The professors and graduate assistants were not liars that would manufacture data and sell their credentials to the highest bidder.

I saw a lot of research being done to develop new drugs, especially for cancer. It was extremly expensive, slow and often led to a dead end. And it was funded by drug companies. They did not say "Here is xxxxx number of dollars, now make this drug look good." Rather they said "here's xxxxx number of dollars. See if you can find a connection between this protein/enzyme/etc and the growth of certain cancer cells."

If someone or some industry did not have a stake in the outcome, they would have no reason to fund the research.

James