One in Three Coal Miners Has Black Lung. Compliance Isn't Enough.

Hey, rip from the headlines.

And, you know, there's a lot of things always going on in occupational safety and health.

But we tend to think as the years go by, we get better.

But look, I was shocked.

I had my great grandfather died of black lung.

And I actually knew him when I was a teenager, veteran of World War One.

He was a coal miner and he passed away in the early 1980s.

But he had black lung in the 70s.

And so this this.

This article that just came out about this NAAS study really resonated with me because it says, Black lung disease among Appalachian coal miners has come back to levels not seen since the 1970s.

Based

on NAAS study.

So the headline published by NPR took a peer-reviewed NOSH research and went back and what they studied was some veteran underground coal miners in central Appalachia and looked at the instances of black lung among these coal miners and the statistical rate of the disease among these workers is the highest it's been in 50 years.

Basically, what they did was when they looked at workers who worked in these coal mines that had at least 25 years of working underground, one in three, one in three, 33% had black lung.

That's after all the rules, all the regulations, all the training, all the inspections, all the safety management systems, all this stuff.

And, you know, we don't seem to be getting better.

So today, I think we can talk about that this is not just a mining story.

You know, this is a case study in the normalization of risk.

The hazard was known.

The disease pathway was known.

The control methods, we know what they are.

Medical surveillance systems have been in place forever.

And yet, a third of the workers that are down there are coming down with this debilitating disease.