I was writing this article on wood dust exposure as a response to an earlier post, but thought it might be useful to a wider audience. This is a social media post for interest and entertainment only and intended to stimulate debate – it is not to be considered professional advice so use is at your own risk but it would be great to hear other woodworkers’ experiences and their perspectives on dust control.
The New Zealand government advice shows the characteristics of a document created on the basis of very limited data but may be a decent starting point. https://www.worksafe.govt.nz/topic-and-industry/dust/wood-dust-controlling-the-risks/
Wood dust is considered to be a proven human carcinogen. This is supported by good evidence and most studies show additional risk of nasal and lung cancers in professional woodworkers.
Hardwood dust is considered to be a higher risk than softwood dust but this is not supported by published data. It is therefore prudent to consider all dust to be a hazard.
Respiratory symptoms can clearly be caused by wood dust exposure, but this does not seem to progress to more serious disease, Data series are small but reassuring.
The cancer risk of long-term occupational exposure to wood dust is small. Studies tend to be small and as a result show a wide range of risk with lung and nasal cancers occurring 1.4 to 2.0 times more often in people employed as woodworkers than in controls without wood dust exposure. These cancers are relatively uncommon in non-smokers so this represents small numbers of patients. I was unable in the time available to find data series which compare smoking woodworkers with non-smokers.
It is extremely difficult to remove the effects of other carcinogens, especially alcohol, cannabis and tobacco use. Alcohol and tobacco are known to be synergistic carcinogens, markedly increasing the risk of cancer from other causes and cannabis though itself a much more potent carcinogen than either tobacco or alcohol tends to be under-reported. Most studies report rates of smoking but none report rates of alcohol or cannabis use. Asbestos exposure is also not included.
Evidence shows that it is very difficult to reduce dust exposure meaningfully in a wood shop.
Overall, I think the data is very reassuring that our hobby is not likely to kill us. It’s vanishingly unlikely that a home woodworker would get a cancer or lung damage as a result of wood dust exposure, and the risk even to professional woodworkers is somewhat less than driving for the same period of time. As driving is a risk willingly undertaken by most individuals, it is broadly considered to be a benchmark for acceptable risk.
The risk is very hard to quantify, but lung cancer occurs in about 15 per 100,000 people aged 45-75 who have never smoked per annum. If profession wood dust exposure increases this by 40%, this gives an absolute risk of 6 per 100,000 per year, which is considerably less than the 10 per 100,000 (all road deaths), and is 10 times less dangerous than cycling at around 60 deaths per 100,000 per year. If the risk doubles due to wood dust exposure (this is most unlikely but is the extreme of the published range), the risk would be slightly higher than driving at 15 per 100,000 per year.
As with all carcinogens, the dose is important. For instance, it is just about possible to show an increase in cancer risk in females who drink 30ml of pure alcohol equivalent daily. It is easy to show that in people who drink 100ml daily. Although all carcinogens are best avoided, the dose makes the toxin and it is important to bear this in mind when deciding on action to be taken. Remember that most of the studies are conducted in people who have worked in professional woodshops for many years so extrapolation to hobbyist or small shop use is very difficult. Unlike asbestos or crystalline silica, wood dust is thought to be easily removed from the respiratory tract by the immune system (data lacking) so does not tend to cause persisting irritation though the act of removing it in and of itself exposes tissue to significant toxins from the immune cells.
Given though that dust is de-facto a proven carcinogen, it makes a lot of sense to minimise exposure as doing so does no harm. Evidence supports that the only really effective way to do this is to wear a respirator for all dust generating activity and to clean the air in the shop to reduce exposure when the respirator is removed.
Here is a selection of the papers I have accessed. As the data quality is generally poor, I have relied on meta-analyses too much – these tend to suffer from Rubbish In Rubbish Out, but by and large they are in line with the general thrust of the few better papers. This is by no means a comprehensive clinical review, but is, I think, sufficient to inform hobbyist woodworkers.
Interested to hear comment….
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12197983/ – minimal changes in wood dust concentrations despite intensive intervention.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0224860 – a good attempt to determine a link comparing professional woodshop workers with office workers. This raises concerns, but the interesting data is in the woodworkers with over 15 years of exposure – their level of symptoms was identical to office workers. Increased symptoms were only seen in those with fewer than 15 year’s in the shop. This has many possible causes which would be a very interesting debate. This study albeit in relatively small numbers provides reassurance that wood dust exposure may not cause long term pulmonary health issues.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7317296/ – an old study shows a very small decline in lung function after acute wood dust exposure.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37012384/ – looked at all publications about lung cancer and found a small increase in risk but with low quality evidence. It is very hard to determine the effect of the wood dust as woodworkers may have different lifestyle exposures such as benzene, smoking and cannabis all of which also cause lung cancer themselves and potentiate the effect of other carcinogens.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30677637/ (and others) – although the evidence quality is poor, there is almost certainly a link between occupational wood dust exposure and cancer of the nose and sinuses.
https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/93/1/96/1651181 – exposing mice to very high levels of oak and birch caused significant lung inflammation. Animal studies have shown scarring in the lungs but this has as previously noted not been shown in human studies.
In interpreting these studies it is vital to remember that they are in very small numbers of cases which may under or (more usually) over estimate risk. There is also a risk of positive publication bias, where studies showing a link are several times more likely to be published than studies showing no link. This leads to a risk of data manipulation although I could not see clear evidence of this. Small numbers also lead to problems with data – a couple of outliers can easily make the difference between a significant and non significant result in smaller studies.
Replies
Rob - As you stated your post is intended to stimulate conversation and debate
Risk is a personal choice and should be respected by others. Those who choose to eliminate a specific risk as best as possible may be much wiser than those of us who do not have the same concern.
Your post is just a rant rather than the start of an intellectual debate.
Rob does not appear to be ranting at all.
Vacuum system, air filtration, protective mask, and eye and hearing protection, are all worth it for hobby or professional woodworking. If you have ever had chemo therapy, believe me, you don't want to go through it again. Cancer can still happen for other reasons, some hereditary, some caused by environment. It is worth it to see a physician, take blood tests, and every other examination (rectal, prostrate, ovarian, etc.) to check for other kinds of cancer, too. The medical insurance is worth the cost, because cancer treatment is more expensive.
Sam Maloof lived past 90 and Tage Frid almost made it ..
While I'm all for collecting as much airborne pollutants as possible. there are simply too many conjectures and vague statements in you post to give it any kind or merit. I find it to be nothing more than a collection of opinion and links tenuously supporting one position.
Phrases like "considered to be", "not supported by published data","broadly considered" and " hard to quantify", amongst others, do not help make the case you're addressing.
The title of "Shop dust Evidence" seems to contain little actual evidence at all.
That's pretty much exactly the point - there is very little evidence. It's not as another user put it 'a rant' rather it is a review of the current state of evidence - essentially there isn't much.
Those statements are not conjecture, but rather the appropriate terms to use given the strength of the evidence.
"considered to be a human carcinogen" is actually medically speaking quite a robust statement. The only stronger one would be something like "undoubtedly" or "proven to be" - it is on the list as a class 1 carcinogen, but the evidence supporting that perspective is quite limited and subject to confounding factors.
I'm not actually making a case or trying to prove any point - having done a fairly thorough review of the evidence to date, applying it to home woodworking has to involve a degree of conjecture - there simply are no studies of the effects of wood dust on home woodworkers.
The best I can come up with is that the data supports wood dust being carcinogenic, that the risk of cancer is small but nontrivial and likely far less than driving. There does not seem to be any risk of developing chronic lung disease from wood dust exposure, but again the data series are small.
A responsible person like Rob is mindful of the weight of his statements based on the amount of his research and the limits of the research of others he’s addressing. Therefore, he used phrases like "considered to be", "not supported by published data","broadly considered" and " hard to quantify".
Secondly, if his comments “contain little actual evidence at all”, then the title of "Shop dust Evidence" does in fact contain evidence. (As long as we are picking Rob’s words apart instead focusing on his obvious intent.)
I worry about breathing in wood dust and am purchasing a dust collector that is likely bigger than my needs. I assume it can't be good to breath it in and is likely harmful.
You are correct, wood dust is a proven carcinogen so it is best to keep exposure as small as possible. Cancer is however quite unlikely even in professional wood workers, so wearing a full hazmat suit is probably not needed either.
That’s how I took your post, which I found a little comforting and I don’t understand the negative reaction (post was pretty benign). I have a big 1.5hp cyclone DC and an air filtration unit that I turn on (but not all the time). A shop vac gets attached to my ROS when I’m sanding with it. But I don’t wear a respirator or mask for the most part. I’m not at all worried about my exposure to dust, and the current “evidence” seems to support my lack of worry. And to another point you made, if something does go kaplooey with me in the end, I’d be much quicker to attribute it to
my years of hard living than my time in the shop.
Thanks for your post and the review of evidence.
I second this.
Joe -
You should do want makes you sleep the best at night.
It is your money to spend how you choose.
Your decision to follow your gut is the best decision.
I learned this fundamental safety lesson from a seven (7) year old who is now a Cardio Thoracic Intensivist at the Cleveland Clinic and a National Champion Athlete.
It is very hard not to make derogatory comments about this post.
You are invited to do a better and more comprehensive review.
I doubt you will find better evidence.
If you are interested, then you can read the links.
"Go with your gut" is one of the most dangerous and stupid things to do and has led to a great many catastrophes.
It is far better to sit back a bit and ask what you know, what you don't know and how those will make a difference in decision-making.
In the end, a choice should be informed by data, not by heuristics. That you have not yet come to harm does not mean you will not in the future.
Gut-derived opinions are often regurgitated hoary old myths that the opiner has chewed, swallowed and then fetched-up as some form of wisdom of the ages. Best to scrape them off the discussion-floor and put them in the bin!
An associated habit is to dismiss all and any different perspectives as a result of "overthinking", meaning "no thinking at all" would be somehow much better; or perhaps just preferable, to some. :-)
It's very difficult to differentiate the major, prevalent or even true cause of this or that result when there are many candidate-causes as well as a long delay between possible causes and their possible effects manifesting many years later. There's a whole range of cancers, for example, for which the most cogent explanation is: probably due to environmental causes (unspecified, as there are 29 candidate-causes, all occurring 3 - 33 years ago; plus maybe another 13 as yet unrecognised candidate-causes).
Still, dusty workshops are unpleasant and there are other dust-caused deleterious results in humans that are more certain. Might as well have a dust extractor, then.
Since teeny-weeny particles of all sorts of stuffs seem to have a very amplified set of deleterious effects on humans, best to have a dust extractor that majors on capturing that ultra-fine stuff before, at the very least, it blocks up your alveoli or gets in your blud to stimulate a hay-fever like response from your immune system, including a bad temper.
*******
But even dust collection as a mere *subject* of discussion can cause some folk to have an over-reaction and bad-tempered response, it seems. :-) Still, if two famous woodworkers lived to an old age, dust can't possibly be anything to worry about. Same goes for tablesaws with no riving knife, guard and a knackered blade, obviously!
In short, we must all do as we like, no matter how daft it may be.
Lataxe, quite clean, tidy and no cough (so far).
“[Deleted]”
Good grief.
First, rob agreed with Joe; Effort to minimize risk is wise.
Next, rob added that getting cancer from woodworking (which rob just said should be avoided) is not highly likely. This is not derogatory toward Joe’s and Rob’s statements that cancer is bad and efforts to avoid it is wise.
It’s no wonder this leads rob to get frustrated with other’s unfounded accusations.
If the risk of Cancer is not sufficient reason to wear a mask and/or have good air treatment then perhaps COPD is a better motivator and a more likely outcome. How long any particular wood worker even (Tage Frid) lives breathing wood dust is irrelevant. Just as every smokers logic I knew who brought up some 90 year old chain smoker as evidence, it is rare and not generalizable evidence of anything.
COPD is a rough protracted death of gasping and wheezing. There are lots of reasons not to breathe in any kinds of particulate and risk of cancer is not the only criteria that should matter. Modern commercial cabinet shops here in Canada are near dustless and that is because it is required by occupational health standards.
The comprehensive review and concern for someone else’s personal decision on comfort level with safety has more over kill than the Oneida V3000 Dust Collector.
Interestingly, there is no evidence that wood dust causes COPD.
I looked quite hard to find some.
The best I could find was the study referenced above which showed that respiratory symptoms were more common in people with less than 15 years of wood working but no more common in those with more than 15 years.
There are many reasons for this but it is largely speculation.
It would be reasonable to test the hypothesis that those who are susceptible to irritation by wood dust are more likely to leave, and so are under-represented in the longer term group. I am sure you can think of others.
There is a big difference between a commercial shop where you are exposing employees who have no choice but to be exposed if they stay at work, and a home shop. There has been a tendency of late for people to be absolutely paranoid about dust and to try to make their home shops as dust free as the clean room at a chip fab - no issues with that, but it's probably overkill.
My advice would be to avoid dust exposure insofar as it is reasonably practicable, taking into account your personal circumstances, but not to get too worried if a little gets up your nose from time to time.
“[Deleted]”
Since this is titled "Shop Dust Evidence" and that title doesn't mention cancer, I'm a little surprised at some of the negative comments here. Yes, the post does center on cancer, but it got me thinking about dust collection in general. Think and act as you want, but I don't see how the case for a more dust-free and therefore cleaner shop environment can be debated.
Years ago I was cutting and shaping many board feet of cedar (my first use of the wood) for a home project and had never experienced any ill effects from wood without using dust collection. When that project came to and end I had a serious bout of asthma requiring medication. Was it caused by the wood species I chose? I don't have definitive proof, but after that I started dust collecting religiously. No more respiratory issues since then (even using cedar) and my entire shop is cleaner and more pleasant to work in.
Funny thing, I was cruising around the site today and found the post "Dangerous Chemistry-Woods to Be Wary of: which contains the phrase (refering to cedar): "Cedrol is also an allergen for many people, credited in 2016 with making a sizable portion of the FBI sick when a large, unfinished cedar sculpture was placed in the bureau’s headquarters." Huh.
There's a point at which common sense (which is not equally distributed among the population) tells you when something is just plain not good for you. There's still often an attitude around that health &safety measures are for sissies. Imagine if people had figured out that asbestos was not good to breathe a long time ago.
As a healthcare researcher before retirement, I appreciate that Rob-ss provided this summary of the available, but limited, evidence. A very significant percentage of healthcare recommendations do not have good quality evidence to back them. Often because it’s too difficult to do good research due to ethical reasons, cost, or as in this case, the incidence of the disease is so low. That’s why guidelines change so often; new study comes out and previous assumptions need to be revised. Thank you Rob-ss. Personally I believe in limiting dust exposure quite a bit with air filtration always and masks when sanding but of course support any decision of those who need to do more for their level of comfort.
Rob_ss and others looking for relevant research. I have just searched pubmed and there are numerous articles going back to the early 1970s and up to 2023 identifying risk increases for nasal adenocarcinoma, chronic bronchitis and asthma among wood manufacturing occupational groups. The earlier studies were from the UK and the Nordic countries + Germany and to a much lesser degree North America. Look for industrial medicine journals. There are of course qualifications and limits to these sorts of studies as you can not ethically randomly assign people to wood dust exposure. I expect for the majority of home woodworkers who are not slapping sheets of melamine or mdf around 8 hours a day it is a less important health concern. Still there is no shortage of studies and you should consider your own health history to determine your risk. I am a not quite retired health researcher who spent his early career in pulmonary medicine mostly asthma before moving on to other non-pulmonary areas of public health interest. So I am no expert but I am pretty familiar with public health research methods. Wood dust is not asbestos but do look into it and make an honest attempt at minimizing your risk. If you can afford a decent shop table saw, then you can afford to get a machine to suck the dust away. Your money, your life and your choice.
In response to the OP's original intent to stimulate debate, I suggest this.
I would frame the title as a question, simply by adding a question mark.
Shop Dust Evidence?
As many other posters have mentioned there are reports and studies going back decades and virtually every state and county (at least here in CA) have regulations on exposure.
So why is this not more of an issue?
is it because people are unaware or that it's not as hazardous as (____) or they simply don't care.
IMO, overloading people with reference documents and statistics is not how to spark debate. Ask questions and listen
No doubt a hot topic. How bad is it? How much is too much dust? How well does your dust collector work with your machines and how are measuring to make sure? On and on the list goes. I have no firm answers for anyone. I'm just trying to do the best I can with incomplete information and hopefully not harm myself or my family. And yes, the Bill Pentz situation scared me quite a bit.
Then again, a good friend of mine had a professor at Dartmouth die from mercury poising from getting a single drop of monomethylmercury on her glove that went through the glove (wrong type of glove) and through her skin into her bloodstream. By the time they figured out what was wrong with her, there was nothing they could do. Does that make me over paranoid in my woodworking PPE? Probably, maybe. Just trying to do the best I can. I will stop rambling. I don't begrudge folks who want more or less dust collection or PPE than I use for woodworking or other activities.
I've never heard of any of the studio woodworkers from the 40'S through the 70s dying or suffering from wood dust acquired disease. Machines from that era usually had no interface for connections to dust extraction built in. These small shop dust extractors and filters were not common until the 1980s.
I was in a factory once, and set for demolition, but had been a major producer of Victorian and later era trim and such. So from late 19th century to 1970s and probably thousands of employees passing through had no dust extraction. I guess a boy with a broom ? Industry wasn't all that concerned with the health of their workers and had a history of resisting doing anything about it when they did know. Coal dust, asbestos ,lead etc. were well known to be seriously dangerous for years and years before steps we taken to do something about it. If they had dust extraction it's more likely it had to do with economics more than health and safety. But while you hear or read about the workers from various industries having health problems associated with their work I can't say I've ever read about workers from wood products manufacturing being included in that list. Accidents,deafness certainly, but not health problems.
With that said I did know one person who through his own self made situation managed to acquire wood dust caused lung disease. On oxygen for years and it eventually did kill him!
I would look to the Scandinavian country's or Germany ,maybe Canada for studies. Country's that have large wood product industries and governments that have a vested interest in people's health if only because it costs them money when people get sick.
Research in another area, namely psychology, shows that humans are pretty poor at evaluating relative riskiness. Flying in commercial jets makes people nervous, as it seems so risky, but only seems so because the rare crashes are so noticeable and so many people die. As I understand it, I am more at risk driving on public highways the 100 miles to the Nashville airport than I am getting on an airplane. But driving seems like a "normal" activity, as we somehow accept the risk. Many of us use our seat belts, and are glad that there are air bags and collapsing steering columns and other safety features on the cars, to reduce the risk of serious injury or death (but not eliminate it.)
Teasing out of limited data exactly how many cases of cancer inhaling wood dust creates is a tricky business. How many of the subjects also used petroleum based solvents in their finishes (also known to cause cancer) as well as breathing the wood dust. How many smoked? What were the actual doses of the dust, the solvents, the tobacco? What were their genetic profiles like? Some of these things interact, just as your diet and other life style choices can lessen your risk of cancer.
So, it looks likely that fine wood dust is not particularly good for you to inhale, but it's probably not in the "really nasty" category (where I put lacquer thinner, for example) or the "clearly deadly" category that includes asbestos. Probably better to reduce your exposure, within reason. Is it necessary to quit wood working because of the risk? Clearly not.
To be clear, I love my dust collection system. It removes almost all the dust from my shop (and all the fine dust) except for the rare times when I can't capture the dust at the source, like routing the edge of a large table top too big for the router table. It saves me gobs of time sweeping and otherwise dealing with all the dust and shavings I create. And it reduces the chance of a fire becoming a major event by never allowing significant shavings to accumulate (tho there are a couple machines I have to assist, as shavings do accumulate under them.) It also almost completely eliminates a problem called chip carry-through, where a wood chip gets caught on a cutting edge (of a planer or jointer or router, for example) and dents the wood as it goes past the work piece, keeping the cutting edge from making a clean cut. Really hard to get out, as it distorts the wood fairly deeply. I had problems with it until I got a serious dust collection system for my thickness planer.
So far I haven't heard of anyone deciding they don't need their dust collector after all, and getting rid of it, unless they maybe move to using all hand tools and no sanding. Those who have them seem to like them...
At one point, I worked a contract chemical manufacturing company and we were starving for business (to the point where we went bankrupt). As such, we were willing to look at any chemistry manufacturing process for commercial use in humans (ie pharmaceuticals). This was the mid-2000s. We had a company reach out to us to do the final crystallization step to make fentanyl. We were serious enough to the point I was on the phone with the DEA to find out what kind of safe we needed to have in place. One day, while eating lunch, I decided to look up the LD50 (lethal dose that kills 50 percent of the animal species its tested in). Based on monkeys, the LD50 for an average size male was at or less than 1 mg (been too many years for me to recall the exact number). I about choked on my sandwich. That meant that airborn dust of it could easily be lethal. To make it, we were going to need to be wearing the equivalent of pharmaceutical space suits. I really didn't want to be doing this or working in a facility that did this. Just too dangerous and one small mistake could kill. Yes, there would be safety measures in place, appropriate engineering with redundancies, etc, etc. However, when you are the one doing it, it becomes much more real. I had very mixed emotions about when we went out of business. I was sad as I really wanted the company to succeed. Yet, I was relieved because I wouldn't have that danger to deal with. As such, wood dust doesn't scare me quite as much. Still, I want to be safe but there are far worse things I almost did and some other potentially dangerous things I did actually do as a bench chemist. I will take woodworking any day of the week.
Thanks rob for your time and comments. I’m trying to make an informed decision as to if woodworking is financially possible for someone to be a hobbyist woodworker that likes to breathe. Many people on social media ESSENTIALLY say that it is not financially possible for most people so they should not consider it. Again, I’m not looking for only what I want to be true, but truth itself. Still, I’m hanging on to the hope that a good dust mask/respirator will tip the scales in favor of the common man woodworker.
Admittedly I didn't read every link offered in this post. Perhaps a character limit is in order. You asked to share personal experience. When I 1st started I didn't have dust collection, air filter, didn't wear a mask. This non-smoker came down with bronchitis 2 years in a row. The doctor started asking a lot of questions after I told him I don't smoke. His eyes got real big when I told him about my hobby. He encouraged me to use all the things I didn't have. I was on a shoe string budget. Fast forward I have DC, air filter and a respirator. No more bronchitis. Could I still get cancer? sure. However, I can't deny the symptomatic things it stopped liked a nose clogged with saw dust buggers and no more bronchitis. Is the shop dust free? Nope. But it's close and it does help.