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.

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.

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.

> 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.

(you really shouldn’t breathe wood dust)

Fine point: that is the list of substances that cause cancer, which is a more narrow set than "things" that cause cancer. The number one thing that increases a person's risk of cancer is age. After age, physical and genetic dispositions (aka family history) are also "things" that elevate cancer risks.

“Age” is more like “time spent exposed to carcinogens”

So is Testosterone. And Titanium dioxide, which is one of the main ingredients of almost every wall paint.

You don't have much to worry about from wall paint as long as you aren't sanding or eating it.

OTOH, it is a very economical colorant, so it is in a ton of foods (FDA still has it approved under 1% by weight of the food item), toothpaste, makeup, skin creams, white tattoo ink, and so on.

Wood dust is absolutely not something to mess with. Chips - what most people think of as "sawdust" - aren't the scary part. The scary part is the too-small-to-see stuff that has a physical structure remarkably similar to a number of things that are extremely Not Good To Breathe.

Also, as a sibling notes, the stuff (chips and dust alike) can contribute to some really memorable conflagratory experiences.

There used to be a site that listed everything that the Daily Mail (a low-quality British newspaper) had claimed could cause or prevent cancer (and often both): http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2009/09/07/kill-or-cure/

Now all I can find is this partial list: https://www.anorak.co.uk/288298/tabloids/the-daily-mails-lis...

Seems like at this point it would be easier to have a list of things unknown to the state of california. it feels like it would be smaller.

It wouldn't and they only list things that have shown some minimal amount of research.

Not updated yet, perhaps. Aspartame is in the same WHO group (2(b)) as aloe vera.