Eric Reyes-Barriga

When Eric Reyes-Buriga first got a job in the stone fabrication industry, he liked it.

He worked with customers and learned a skilled trade.

Reyes-Briga, who's now 36 years old and has two children, was making countertops, like the ones you may have in your kitchen or bathroom.

He would take large slabs of stone and cut them to a customer's specific dimensions, then polish and round off the edges, exactly to spec.

He says they took basic precautions in his shop.

No one told him about the risks.

He was diagnosed with a disease he had never heard of, silicosis.

Silicosis is an irreversible, incurable lung disease caught from inhaling small particles of silica dust over several decades, usually in heavy industrial settings.

It's been called Grinder's disease, Miner's pythus, and Potter's rot.

It's the world's oldest known occupational disease.

There's evidence of it occurring in Neolithic men who chiseled tools and weapons out of stone.

It's also been seen in the lungs of Egyptian mummies.

Reyes Pariga's wife encouraged him to get a CT scan himself.

He had been cutting engineered stone for about a decade.

His results came back positive for silicosis.

Dr. Jane Fazio is a pulmonologist for the UCLA medical system.

In the past five years, she's begun seeing more and more silicosis patients, including men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Silicosis was something she'd read about in medical school, but it wasn't something she expected to see in 21st century America.

Over the past decade, Reyes-Briga and his colleagues started working more and more with engineered stone slabs instead of natural stone slabs.

These kinds of countertop materials have exploded in popularity in the U.S.