Coal is a killer in so many ways. Not only are the CO2 emissions adding enormously to climate change, but the mercury emissions are poisoning people, fish and the environment, mountaintop removal is decimating forests and mountains in the southeast and toxins in water from mining are causing severe human health hazards.  Recently reported is the fact that coal miners are getting black lung disease at twice the rate they did only a couple of decades ago.

“Black lung disease is the common name for coal workers’ pneumoconiosis. It is caused by breathing coal dust over an extended period of time. As coal dust accumulates in the lungs—the body is capable of neither dissolving nor expelling the coal—lung tissue is destroyed, reducing lung capacity and leading to fibrosis and a greater risk of emphysema, chronic bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses. There is no cure for this extremely painful and incapacitating disease. As lung tissue hardens, miners become short of breath and suffer excruciating pain each time they breathe.”

The rise in black lung is directly related to the push by coal operators to extract greater profits by extracting more coal in a shorter time with fewer workers.”

Want to see what black lung disease looks like? After the break there are a couple of photos of it. It will make you quit smoking and/or mining coal, if you do either one.

The problem now is that coal miner lung disease is on the rise. In Eastern  Kentucky, “the disease persists — and is far worse than federal health officials anticipated it would be by now.” Coal company owners are trying to get more work out of fewer people, and even with mountaintop removal happening (which takes less workers) coal mining underground continues. Imagine working in a coal mine for 20-30 years, and what your lungs would look like. Is it work it to these people to become incapacitated with lung disease at the ripe old age of 42 or 46, the age at which some of these men have to retire because they are literally dying? I’m sure if they had it to do over again, they’d rather do just about anything but mine for coal!

“More than 10,000 miners have died from black lung in the past 10 years, compared to 400 miners who have died from accidents over the same period. The number of fatalities is expected to rise as more miners become incapacitated by this debilitating disease.

According to figures released by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), nearly 9 percent of miners with 25 years or more experience tested positive for black lung in 2005-2006, the latest year for which published data is available. This compares to 4 percent of miners in the late 1990s. The rates also doubled for miners with 20 to 24 years in the mines, many of whom are in their late 30s and 40s.

This is what it looks like.

(Click for larger pictures. Sorry they are so [...]