Just to add a little fuel to the fire; I ran into an older gentleman
(who asked me not to mention his name over the internet) over the
weekend at the Home Depot who has retired from both the lumber
industry and the woodworking industry. He said that this debate is
much, much older than I thought. He told me that he's known of many
similar instances of what I had told him and everyone in this
newsgroup. He said that the symptoms are usually passed off as
another type of problem.

He went on to say that supposedly the fungi that grow on the wood
won't malignantly seek us out to cause problems but their spore when
stirred up can get into the respiratory system and open us up for
other infections. Then to the contrary, he added that he could
remember a small bit of lumber that sat in an old drying shed that had
no fungi or mold or anything as he said on it and it still
decomposed. He said that this in particular led him to believe there
may be something we were not aware of that made wood (cut wood I
suppose) its home and was perhaps the main contributor to
decomposition. He added that it may actually be an infectious agent
or have infectious properties, but being unknown it was simply passed
off as something else.

His reasoning behind this was he had known people who told him that
before coming to work in these industries had no known allergies or
chronic illnesses, but after exposure to the wood (even those not
around the machines where sawdust was generated; I asked) would
develope chronic problems that were passed off as allergies, the flu,
bronchitis or similar by doctors. He could even recall customers that
frequented the yard he worked in complaining that they had not had
problems before entering construction or other jobs that required
working with lumber or wood. The people he referred to that wasn't
around sawdust worked in an area of the yard he called the "pick yard"
or "picking area" (I can't exactly remember which). Now I'm not
really sure what that is, but he said it was far away from the
machines that did the cutting.

He then told me of a Doctor he thought was out of Australia or maybe
it was New Zealand that had discovered a microbe (for lack of actual
terminology) or something that was infectious and smaller than a
virus. Strangely it seemed I thought I could remember seeing
something on television some time ago about this very Doctor, but had
not payed that much attention to it. It scared me pretty good and
with this all in mind, I have to wonder. What do I need to do to take
care of my lumber and myself? I bet I won't do any more cutting or
woodworking without one of those filtered masks on.