John, Bill P is locked out of SMC till further notice, I certainly hope he returns.... a few comments on your post...

I agree with your methodology of trying to determine just how damaging the fine wood dust is (or even the large wood dust) by looking back at history. I too think it holds some of the answers to just how risky wood dust is. Like mentioned prior in this thread, there seems to be some analogies to smoking cigarettes here, i.e. some can smoke and die of lung cancer at 40, while others smoke till they are in their 90's and die from something else.

Grain workers have suffered a lot of respiratory healthy problems due to fine dust. I suspect their industry has better clearing house of these types of problems, and therefore their fine dust gets more media exposure.

I too was trying to find more answers regarding what % of long term woodworkers have dust related illnesses. The data seems a bit elusive, hence why i was probing Bill P for his comments on this subject, because in the absence of hard data, sometimes we have to rely on the closest thing we can find - such as a clearing house of data, and it maybe, that might be Bill P is the closest thing we have to a clearing house.

Hopefully when Bill P returns to this thread, he will provide a bit more data in this area.