Tagged: black lung disease

GOP members on the U.S. House Appropriations committee have inserted language into a bill to block a new Mine Safety and Health Department initiative to reduce occurrences of black lung disease--or coal workers' pneumoconiosis.

NPR's Howard Berkes reported on the new language this morning on NPR's news blog The Two Way:

Friday on WFPL's Byline, our environment reporter Erica Peterson spent some time with NPR reporter Howard Berkes and Chris Hamby with the Center for Public Integrity. They’ve been investigating a serious resurgence in black lung disease in Appalachia in a series of reports and features made public last week.

An investigation by NPR and several partners has found that black lung disease is far from being eradicated among coal miners. On the contrary: the reports outline a disease where diagnoses have doubled in the last decade in parts of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia.

Black lung disease--also called coalworkers' pneumoconiosis--is a disease caused by breathing large amounts of coal dust.

A new study shows that black lung disease isn’t limited to coal miners who work underground.

Studies for coal workers’ pneumoconiosis—or black lung disease—haven’t been done on surface miners in a decade, and the miners were commonly thought to be less at risk for the disease than underground workers. Surface mines are open to the air, after all, and underground coal mines have frequent dust issues caused by mining in constricted spaces without much ventilation.