Black Lung Disease Comes Storming Back in Coal Country

Federal investigators this month identified the largest cluster of advanced black lung cases ever officially recorded.

More than 400 coal miners frequenting three clinics in southwestern Virginia between 2013 and 2017 were found to have complicated black lung disease, an extreme form characterized by dense masses of scar tissue in the lungs.

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Across the coal belt in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia, “there’s an unacceptably large number of younger miners who have end-stage disease and the only choice is to get a lung transplant or wait it out and die,” Dr. Blackley said.

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High Fidelity said:

Shame, but it's their own choice.

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majj27 said:

Wonder what triggered the rise. Failure in safety measures? Lax oversight? Unreported cases being caught after the fact?

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High Fidelity said:

It's 2017. Anyone claiming not to know about the risks of coal mining is probably someone trying to fill jobs or win votes.

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It's a familiar tale across Appalachia. Two hours north and east, beyond twisting mountain roads, Danny Smith revved up a lawn mower. He wore jeans, a T-shirt and a white face mask stretching from eyes to chin, and he pushed only about 15 feet before he suddenly shut off the mower, bent to his knees and started hacking uncontrollably.

"Oh God," he gasped, as he spit up a crusty black substance with gray streaks, and then stared at the dead lung tissue staining the grass. Still coughing and breathing hard, Smith settled into a chair on his porch and clipped an oxygen tube to his nose.

After spending just 12 years underground, his lungs are so bad he faces what coal miners decades older and with decades more in mining have endured. His lung tissue is dying so fast, his respiratory therapist says, it just peels away.

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Bandan said:

If there is a rise in lung disease, it would most likely be in older men that worked long ago before safety regulations were put in.

Modern coal is a different animal. They even use the emissions to make drywall.

Coal is much cleaner than wind energy. Look into the neodymium mining they have to do to build those turbines. If you want something to fret over, that will make you move under your bed and never come out.
Not to mention the dangerous loss of bird life from wind energy.
So much money made on alternate energy, it isn't tough to figure out how 100 people managed to get ownership of half of all the money in the world, and they're all new age, progressive, climate change promoting, globalists.

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