HEALTH - Black Lung Disease Rising

"Deadly Black Lung Disease Rises Among Coal Miners" PBS Newshour 7/9/2012

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): .... a new investigation finds a resurgence of a deadly disease in coal mining country.

Again, Hari Sreenivasan.

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): More than four decades ago, Congress set a goal of eradicating black lung disease by passing a law that limited miners' exposure to coal dust.

But a joint investigation by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity found many miners are still exposed to too much dust, leading to a doubling of black lung rates in just a decade.

The disease, which can be accompanied by coughing, congestion and difficulty with breathing, is debilitating and irreversible. More than 10,000 miners died from it nationwide between 1995 and 2004. The analysis shows many cases in Appalachia, a region that includes parts of Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia.

In West Virginia alone, more than 2,000 miners died over a decade.

Howard Berkes of NPR was one of the lead reporters on this story. He joins me now from Salt Lake City.

Other significant excerpts

HOWARD BERKES, National Public Radio: But the other thing that's occurred is that the law that was passed to protect miners from black lung and from the dust that causes black lung was never really seriously enforced. It was filled with loopholes from the very beginning that enabled mining companies to basically game the system.



HARI SREENIVASAN: Your reporting indicates discrepancies between when federal inspectors decide to measure the coal dust in the mines vs. when the companies report it themselves. How does that happen?

HOWARD BERKES: Well, that happens in part because, in the system, which is partially dependent on self-policing by mining companies, a federal mine inspector goes into a mine and takes a measurement for coal dust and finds there's a violation, that there's too much coal dust.

The mining company then has the opportunity to take five of its own samples of coal dust and then average them. And right off the bat, just the averaging could lower the reading. And if the averaging is below the standard, the limit, the safe limit for coal dust, then the violation is erased.

And what we found is that there were more than 50,000 coal dust -- valid coal dust samples taken that were above the federal limit, but only 2,400 violations were issued. We don't know exactly what happened with each of those cases, but it suggests that there were thousands of coal miners in those cases who were exposed to excessive coal dust, but the system that is easily gamed by mining companies was such that those overexposures didn't result in violations issued to those companies.

COMMENT: Need I say, Republicans don't mind. This is better than tough government regulation of the mining industry (which could jeopardize industry 'donations' to the Republican cause).