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 health care is being curtailed
Dr James Brandon Crum was alarmed. For months, unemployed coal miners had been coming into his clinic in Coal Run Village, KY 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 68-foot 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 coal mine as a youth, knew that this man, who was suffering from progressive mass fibrosis – the severe or complicated form of black lung disease – could have just as easily have been him.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PxtuTK
