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Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

I mean, wood dust is no joke. Because of its size, you can end up with micro wounds all throughout the respitory system, and those in turn act as something like a nucleation site for infections and cancer. If you're doing a lot of sanding or running a lathe or mill, you can lose decades of your life by not using proper dust control schemes.

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It's actually not that black and white. Wood dust is linked to a statistically significant increase in the occurrence of a very rare nasal cancer. But the thing is, in woodworkers and in the general population alike, it's still a very rare cancer. You're orders of magnitude more likely to die of other cancers, whether you work with wood or not. This should be way, way down your list of risks.

There is a simpler reason to avoid wood dust: it causes allergies, asthma, and other non-cancer respiratory issues in a fair number of people.

Yes. IPF and friends are more of a death sentence than nasal cancer. Nasal cancer at least has a meaningful treatment outside of "double lung transplant" (which itself only has like 50-60% 5 year survival rate, and is essentially unavailable to most people with IPF due to age).

I'm aware of the stage 3 pipeline for IPF. I would still rather have cancer in most cases.

IPF = Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis

I don't know why people so much care about cancer than other illness/injury. Why is a dedicated cancer insurance a thing? Is there any historical reason?

Never heard of it before, but I would guess almost certainly due to exclusions in non-specific policies.

It’s also explosive just to add to the fun.

And some woods are poisonous (rosewood for example) to begin with.

And some non-poisonous woods are treated with various chemicals and glues that are themselves separate dangers.

> nucleation site for infections and cancer.

Asbestos is like that. It's not inherently carcinogenic, but there is some kind of mechanical process associated with asbestos fibers that activates cancer.

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