I did Google metal fume fever and noted that welding or burning galvanized steel was mentioned. Back in my ironworker days I've had to do that here and there so out of curiosity I googled 'welding galvanized steel'. I was surprised to see no mention of drinking milk before welding or burning the stuff. One of the first things the old timers would tell you to do if you were going to be around the fumes and it worked to keep from getting sick.

I suffer from tinnitus as a result of not wearing ear protection. We used pneumatic impact hammers to run up high strength bolts and worse yet the old pneumatic riveting guns known as "hell dogs" to knock out drift pins and sometimes cut off and drive out rivets to replace them with bolts on old bridges. They call them hell dogs because of the noise. For the past 25 or so years I'm never without the sound of birds chirping because we didn't wear ear protection.

I also burned (cut with an acetylene torch) and welded on structural members with lead paint and worked around a fair amount of asbestos in industrial construction and nuclear power houses in my younger days with little or no protection. Back then the contractor's philosophy was "don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon." I imagine that hasn't changed much. I was told following a lung x-ray in my twenties that I had metal in my lungs. So as they used to say in the morning on some of those jobs,"work safe fellas."