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
All that rock that miners were cutting produced this silica dust, and silica is actually 20 times more toxic than coal dust alone.
And because it's sharp, it can embed in lungs forever.
Every miner we talked to had a story about silica dust.
These silica particles are invaders in the lung, and the lung tissue fights back.
It becomes thicker and harder as it tries to expel this foreign substance.
Fibrotic tissue builds up and builds up, and it makes it more and more difficult to breathe.
nodules form, and when they get larger and more of them form, the disease becomes far more serious.
This is known as progressive massive fibrosis, or simply it's called complicated black lung.
It's incurable, it's fatal, and it was once rare among younger minors like Mark McCowan.
Of all things, it was a text message.
In the summer of 2016, my cell phone buzzed.
This was a text message from a very reliable source, and it simply said this.
I've seen as many complicated black lung cases in the last month as I've seen in the last 30 years.
Guys are really that sick.
Something is up.
Of course, I had to verify this, and I thought about two kinds of places that would be witnessing a monumental escalation in cases if such a thing was actually happening.
One, there are law firms that represent coal miners who are seeking state or federal black lung benefits.
They'd have an increase in business.
And two, the medical clinics that diagnose black lung and treat symptoms.
And I quickly found that both were swamped with cases, especially in Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia.
Showing 81–100 of 259 · page 5 of 13
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