Federal surveillance data published this week show that black lung disease among veteran underground coal miners in central Appalachia has reached its highest recorded level since 1978, a finding that lands in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia coalfield communities where the disease was supposed to be disappearing.
Researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reported in a peer-reviewed research letter in a respiratory medicine journal that 32.5 percent of miners with at least 25 years underground in those three states tested positive for coal workers' pneumoconiosis on X-rays conducted over the last five years, roughly one in three. The last time the rate was that high for miners with the same work history was 1978, and when NIOSH last reported the rate in 2018, it was 20.6 percent. The current estimate is more than a fourfold increase over the low point of about 7 percent recorded in 1999.
