Coal
miners across Appalachia are dying from a resurgence of severe black
lung disease. But could this epidemic have been prevented?
This is one of many tough questions grappled with in Coal’s Deadly Dust, a new investigation from FRONTLINE and
NPR that premieres tonight on PBS.
NPR
Correspondent Howard Berkes was reporting on the disease when he
received a tip about an outbreak of severe black lung — a disease that
epidemiologists thought was nearly gone. Berkes met with a radiologist
whose clinic was so overwhelmed with such cases, he turned to the
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), for
answers. The NIOSH researchers found it difficult to believe
what the radiologist had seen.
From
2011 to 2016, federal researchers at NIOSH had counted only 99 cases of
this incurable disease nationwide; however, FRONTLINE and NPR
identified more than 2,000 in Appalachia alone in the same time frame.
In most cases, silica dust, not coal dust, likely played the key role.
Silica
dust is known to be nearly 20 times more toxic than carbon-based coal
dust — but as the film reveals, federal regulators and the mining
industry never treated the lethal dust as a unique threat.
“It’s
pretty difficult to hear the miners just working so hard to catch their
breath and to know that the reason for that is those exposures at work
that we absolutely know how to prevent,” Celeste Monforton, a former top
official at the Mine Safety and Health Administration says. She adds,
“It’s abundantly clear…this problem really is a silica problem…this is
such a gross and frank example of regulatory failure.”
And
while the mining industry and federal regulators both say they've made
progress in protecting miners, there still is no plan for tougher
regulation of silica at coal mines – and there are still more than
50,000 coal miners working nationwide.
Also this hour, FRONTLINE presents Targeting Yemen.
Correspondent Safa Al Ahmad offers a report from on the ground in
Yemen, where she investigates the escalation of the deadly U.S. fight
against Al Qaeda and its
lasting impact on Yemeni civilians.
Thank you for watching.
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