Howard Berkes
speaker
259 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 9 Aug
Howard Berkes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They are.
Even working coal miners in that same region with as little as 15 to 20 years underground have tested positive at a rate not seen in nearly 40 years.
Well, when we last spoke three years ago, the most recent report from NIOSH was from 2018, and it found that the same group of career minors had black lung at a rate of 1 in 5, or a 20% chance of having the disease.
So it went from 1 in 5 to 1 in 3.
That's a 65% increase in the rate of the disease in less than 10 years.
And here's another perspective.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, so many coal miners were sick and dying that thousands staged a wildcat strike and marched on Washington.
That prompted Congress to pass new mine safety laws, including strict limits on exposure to the coal mine dust that causes black lung.
And those laws were effective.
20 years later, the rate of disease for these miners had plunged to just 7%.
That's less than 1 in 10 miners.
So when we say now that the disease has come roaring back, we're not exaggerating.
Even the black lung experts were shocked by this data.
I shared this news, by the way, with one pulmonologist who treats coal miners.
Dr. Drew Harris is the medical director at the nation's largest black lung clinic, and he sees miners from across Appalachia.
If you imagined one out of every three school teachers were getting an incurable lung disease because of something that they were exposed to at work, the whole country would put their hands up screaming and stop whatever this exposure was immediately.
And it's sad that this is largely impacting rural Appalachian folks that don't have a voice, that don't have a country to unite behind them.
That's really why this is happening.
That's what the NIOSH researchers say, and there's really nothing else that could explain it.
They also note that this is a progressive, incurable disease.
Showing 221–240 of 259 · page 12 of 13
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