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This week's broadcast of Mountain Stage was recorded at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, CA. On this episode, host Kathy Mattea welcomes GRAMMY-winning Australian rock star Colin Hay, Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn, legendary folk and country artist Ramblin' Jack Elliott, San Francisco rocker Chuck Prophet and his band The Make Out Quartet, and folk duo The Lucky Valentines.
For many years we thought that black lung was a disease of the past. But it has actually stricken a whole new generation of miners, and in some ways, it’s worse than before.
In 2016, an investigation by NPR investigative reporter Howard Berkes discovered a surge in black lung cases throughout Appalachia, and now federal officials are confirming those results for the first time, in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
This week we’ll dive deep into what some are calling a black lung epidemic in central Appalachia and hear from miners battling the disease and doctors trying to understand it.
In this episode, we’ll hear from Robert Bailey, a retired coal miner from Mercer County, West Virginia who suffers from black lung. West Virginia Public Broadcasting first met him in 2014, a year before he underwent a double-lung transplant the next year, an operation paid for through a federal fund that covers black lung medical benefits for bankrupt coal companies. We’ll hear how Robert Bailey’s health is today.
We’ll also hear the tale of two miners: Jerry Helton and Edward Brown. Both men contracted severe black lung disease from working in mines in southwestern Virginia. But as Benny Becker reports, they’ve experienced very different outcomes.
The reality, as NPR reported, is that black lung has long been severely underreported. Some close to the disease, including Anita Wolfe, who works for the Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program at National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety, noticed its resurgence as early as the late ‘90s — namely in miners in their late 30s and early 40s.
When we talked to her more than a decade ago, she said that X-rays in the late 90s showed “younger miners progressing from beginning stages of the disease to the advanced stage of the disease … at a very accelerated rate. Much quicker than we’ve ever seen before.”
Doctors have developed theories on what might be causing the recent uptick, and we’ll hear from them too. They think cutting through rock to get to remaining coal in an area where thick coal seams were already tapped might be to blame.
“Rock can contain high levels of silica, and we all know that silica is incredibly toxic when inhaled, and mixtures of coal dust and silica dust are probably playing an important role in some of the trends that we’ve seen recently,” Dr. David Blackley, a public health researcher, told WBUR’s Here and Now in WHEN.
And Inside Appalachia host Jessica Lilly will close the episode with a personal essay. For her, the illness hits close to home: It affected her grandfather and Nick McCroskey, her childhood classmate who died in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. An autopsy revealed that McCroskey had black lung.
“He was younger than me. These miners have been dying for years. But it took an NPR investigation to get federal officials and the national medical community to pay attention,” she said. “So let’s hope this is a wakeup call, and nobody else’s friends or papaws suffer or die such a horrible death.”
We had help producing Inside Appalachia this week from NPR’s All Things Considered, WBUR’s Here and Now, the Ohio Valley ReSource, and WMMT.
Music in this episode was provided by Lobo Loco, Anna and Elizabeth, Stacy Grubb, and Dr. Turtle.
Inside Appalachia is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting. Scott Finn edited this episode. Patrick Stephens is our audio mixer. Jesse Wright is our executive producer.
Across the nation, there are more and more local news deserts; communities with no local newspaper, television or radio station to cover what’s going on. When a small town paper like The Welch News in McDowell County, WV, can’t compete and shuts down, losing those local eyes and ears can affect accountability. No one is there to watch over things. Local news also provides a sense of cohesion and identity for a community. What happens when it’s gone? This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
On this West Virginia Morning, it has been a year since allegations of illicit recordings of cadets and other women at the West Virginia State Police barracks launched federal and state investigations into the law enforcement department. We speak with the superintendent of state police for an update.
On this West Virginia Morning, political analysts say the two Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate in the upcoming May primary election give voters some particular, and troubling, food for thought. The candidates themselves say voters need to focus on the positives, not the negatives.
Coles and Theresa “Red” Terry have been fighting over the Mountain Valley Pipeline nearly since it was first proposed in 2014. The project connects natural gas terminals in Virginia and West Virginia with a 303-mile pipeline that stretches across some of Appalachia’s most rugged terrain. Almost immediately after construction began, protestors tried to block it by setting up and living in platforms in trees along the route.