A Niosh black pulmonary surveillance van at the Wharton fire station, W.VA.
Howard Berkes / NPR
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tilting legend
Howard Berkes / NPR
Sam Pettsonk grew up in mining communities in southern Virginia-Western, visiting patients with his father, one of the country’s first doctors to specialize in black pulmonary disease.
“When I was a child, I looked up and I would see coal minors – apparently larger than life, doubled to cough, barely capable of walking, working or breathing,” says Pettsonk, “I saw him all my life. I remember it when I was a child and I see him still.”
Today, all the practice of Petsonk’s law in Oak Hill, W.VA., exclusively represents coal miners. He often takes cash of sick people at work, and is based on the files collected by the respiratory health unit of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and HealthA division of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who executes the Coal workers’ health monitoring program. It essentially offers a very unique type of health care in guaranteed workplace: by law, it gives each minor in the country – About 50,000 – Access to care for free.
The 25 people working in this unit were taken on immediate administrative leave on April 1; They are out of their work, with around 10,000 Other federal health Workers later this spring.
The laboratory sent mobile X -ray units to mines to regularly filter minors. He authorized employment transfers for minors showing signs of illness. And the unit has also formed and certified doctors to read specialized pulmonary analyzes. Petsonk says that the health service has become an essential element of mining life. But President Trump’s scanning cuts in the country’s health agencies last week included this small team, which led a coal program, minors are entitled to the law.
“It is a foundation institution of the medical profession that has been erased,” explains Petsonk. “It’s just unacceptable.”
The roots of the program go back to a mining explosion of Farmington, W.VA., which killed 78 workers in 1968. The disaster led to the passage of the Federal law on coal mine and securitywhich in turn added the minor monitoring program under the respiratory health Division in Niosh.
Trial submitted
Late Monday, Petsonk brought an in progress pursuit against Robert F. Kennedy Jr and the agency he now directs, the United States Ministry of Health and Social Services, to restore the respiratory health unit within CDC in CDCs National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health This directed the program epidemiologist, Scott Laney, calls “the national doctor for coal minors”.
Laney led research on the coal workers’ monitoring program at Morgantown WV, until it was put on administrative leave on April 1. Laney says without staff, the coal workers’ health monitoring program and its X -ray, medical records and mobile vans are abandoned.
He notes This program alone has reduced black pulmonary disease alone affecting almost 40% of long -standing coal workers at 2%, around 2000. But in recent years, pulmonary diseases of minors have become a major concern again, says Laney, because the coal is increasingly from mine than coal. This means that minors become more sick, younger – and without the surveillance of coal minors, he says, people will die – and no one will keep the scoring.
“It will have impacts on my neighbors; it will kill young men,” explains Laney. “And this story will become indexed.”
Last week, Laney and others working in the country’s health agencies were thrown into chaos, in the middle of another series of federal cuts. He and other managers have been left while trying to discover it Among their colleagues remained used. Laney says that with almost everyone eliminated from his office, it has become clear that the program of coal minors could not continue at all.
Confidence by minors
But the news of the recent fate of the program has not yet reached affected coal minors, explains Dr. Drew Harris, a pulmonologist and director of the Black pulmonary program in Stone Mountain HealthThe only free program of this type in Virginia. He says that the coal workers’ health program is faithful and universally invoked in these communities.
“In the center of the Appalachians, it’s a big problem,” he said. “These are cities that have been built around the exploitation of coal, and coal minors are like the heart and soul of this community and economic subsistence means for generations.”
Harris says that today’s mines are full of sand dustAnd he sees patients who, at 40, need double pulmonary transplants. Black pulmonary disease, he says, is not One thing in the past and surveillance is still necessary.
“If it disappears, then you know, people will not know that they have a black lung at an earlier age and that more people end up with a serious illness because they have not diagnosed it earlier.”