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
And I asked Laney how he reacted to what he was seeing.
Horror, shock.
I don't know how many other words to use.
It wasn't just Crum's Clinic.
Across the Kentucky border in Virginia, Ron Carson managed three black lung clinics operated by Stone Mountain Health Services, and he said he had more than 600 cases in just three years.
It turned out there was nothing really nefarious going on.
Remember that I said that Laney's agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, tested working miners for black lung disease.
That's its legal mandate.
But 50,000 coal miners have lost their jobs since 2011.
That's because coal plants have shut down and mines have closed.
Some of those minors went into black lung legal and medical clinics to see if they might qualify for black lung benefits.
So the clinics were testing laid-off and retired minors who NIOSH was not testing.
We surveyed clinics in Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
They diagnosed close to 1,000 cases of complicated black lung, 10 times the NIOSH count.
That's right.
If the official count was so low, then there wasn't anything major to be alarmed about.
In fact, there was never direct regulation of silica dust in coal mines.
We knew that the Mine Safety Agency had been sampling for coal dust and silica dust, and we knew that the agency analyzed those samples.
So in 2017, I turned to two of my colleagues on the NPR investigations team who are whizzes at analyzing complex sets of data.
That's Robert Benincasa and Wojing Nan.
Showing 121–140 of 259 · page 7 of 13
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