I remember when I was a child, someone was coughing and another person in the room said " you sound like you've got the black lung." I didn't know at the time that this was a real disease: "Coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP), colloquially referred to as black lung disease."
Black Lung disease is caused by long term exposure to coal dust, which is present in large quantities near where coal is mined, and inside coal mines. Despite the advances in mining technology as well as advances in healthcare technologies, black lung is again on the rise in the US.
In a January, 2010 article, Samuel Davidson points out that this trend "is especially troubling, since they have spent their entire careers supposedly protected by safety standards developed in the 1970s to prevent the disease." He continues that, "more than 10,000 miners have died from black lung in the past 10 years, compared to 400 miners who have died from accidents over the same period. The number of fatalities is expected to rise as more miners become incapacitated by this debilitating disease."
Are we so reliant on coal as a source of energy that we can't protect the men who give their lives to mine it for us? These statistics should make us all take a huge step back and contemplate our energy use, the future of our country's energy use, and what kinds of companies and products we support and patronize, to see where we can make an impact.
Sources:
Alan Derickson, Black Lung: Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster (1998)
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/blac-j11.shtml
http://hillbillysavants.blogspot.com/2006/10/black-lung-on-rise-in-swva.html
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