Government greatly under-reports black lung cases

The government reports less than 10% of the actual black lung cases in coal miners, a National Public Radio survey of individual treatment centers reveals.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reported 99 cases of "complicated" black lung, or progressive massive fibrosis,  in the last five years.

NPR found 962 cases during that time frame in only 11 black lung clinics in West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. The actual total would be higher because some clinics had incomplete records and others declined to provide data.

At United Medical Group, a clinic in Coal Run Village, Ky., radiologist Brandon Crum had 60 cases in 20 months and 644 in three years.

Edward "Lee" Petsonk of West Virginia University has spent three decades addressing the disease and finds NPR's numbers "very disheartening, very disappointing."

"I've spent much of my career trying to find ways to better protect miners' respiratory health," Petsonk says. "It's almost like I've failed."

To read the article, click on http://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505577680/advanced-black-lung-cases-surge-in-appalachia?utm_source=npr

No black lung? Tell that to Steve’s widow

You would think that the days of coal operators pretending that coal miners don’t have black lung so the company doesn’t have to pay for his medical care would be long gone.

Not so.

Patriot Coal Company, usually at the top of the list of arrogant owners who care more about the bottom line than their workers, uses Johns Hopkins doctors when they fight a miner’s claim about black lung. So do other coal companies because they like the “results.”

The companies may pay $631.80 to $1,263.60 a month if their former miners are ruled to have black lung.

Steve Day worked in the southern West Virginia coal mines for 35 years, but Patriot – with an assist from Johns Hopkins – fought his claims and said he did NOT have black lung.

Well, Steve Day died and his autopsy proved Patriot and the Hopkins doctors were wrong. 

More than a half-dozen doctors looked at what was left of his lungs and concluded that he DID have black lung – and one of the worst that those doctors had ever seen.

“A majority of his lungs had been replaced by scar tissue with coal dust,” said Dr. Francis Green, a professor of medicine at the University of Calgary and one of the world’s top experts on the pathology of black lung.

The longtime leader of the Hopkins unit, Dr. Paul Wheeler, testified against Steve and the judge ruled for Patriot, based mainly on Dr. Wheeler’s opinion under oath.

The black lung X-ray-reading program headed by Dr. Wheeler has been suspended, pending an internal review.

On a personal note, I saw that Consolidation Coal Company’s doctors routinely ruled that Monongah coal miners who smoked had emphysema and not black lung. It saved the people who paid the doctor’s salaries a lot of money.

My father, John W. Olesky, Sr., finally WAS given black lung payments. It killed him eventually.

To read the outrageous story of denying black lung claims to miners with black lung, click on http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/how-a-coal-miners-autopsy-proved-a-top-doctor-wrong#38t3q9y