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
One clinic in particular in eastern Kentucky had dozens of cases, including younger miners who were getting very sick very fast.
I interviewed there one of the sickest minors I've ever met, Mackie Branham.
He was just 39 years old when diagnosed, and he compared his situation to his family's history of black lung.
You can hear how hard it is for him to breathe.
I'll probably be the first one to be this bad in the family.
And like a lot of sick minors I've met, Mackey also talked about his eventual fate.
You know, mining jobs have been the best jobs in the hills and hollers of Appalachia.
The best pay, the best benefits.
Miners sometimes have the best houses.
They sometimes have the newest pickup trucks.
There isn't usually anything else that compares or even comes close to what mining can provide these workers.
To begin to answer that question, I went to the clinic where Mackie Branham was diagnosed.
A radiologist there named Brandon Crum is specially trained to assess the chest X-rays of coal miners.
Crum was so shocked, he approached epidemiologists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which tracks black lung disease.
He spoke with Scott Laney, one of the nation's most prominent black lung researchers.
Because Laney's Federal Research Agency, which has tested tens of thousands of working coal miners for black lung for decades, had counted and reported just 99 cases of complicated black lung nationwide in the previous five years.
Brandon Crum had two-thirds as many cases in less time at his small clinic in Kentucky.
Laney wanted proof, so he went to Crum's clinic.
And he agreed to show us some of the medical images.
And we sat there for an entire day, one after another after another, looking at these chest x-rays, the worst I've ever seen.
Showing 101–120 of 259 · page 6 of 13
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