"Today’s black lung rates are higher than 50 years ago, affecting men as young as their 30s, and in Kentucky their right to decent healthcare is being curtailed
Dr James Brandon Crum was alarmed. For months, unemployed coalminers had been coming into his clinic in Coal Run Village, Kentucky, seeking chest radiographs.
One patient in 2015 stood out. He was in his early 40s, about the same age as Crum, and had three children at home, just like him, but he could barely walk. The 68ft hallway between the x-ray room and Crum’s office might as well have been Mount Everest’s summit. The miner repeatedly stopped to catch his breath. Crum, who had worked in his family’s coalmine as a youth, knew that this man, who was suffering from progressive massive fibrosis – the severe or complicated form of black lung disease – could just as easily have been him.
Back in his office, where papers, folders and Post-it Notes cover practically every available surface, Crum started asking his patients detailed questions. There was a mystery: why was he suddenly seeing so much severe black lung – an old man’s disease – thought to be an illness of the past, appearing in younger men with significantly less time in the mines?"
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