Word: lunge
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most dangerous occupation: 12 to 20 times as dangerous as driving a truck, for instance. The Associated Press reports that "a man who spends his life working in the mines faces one chance in 12 of being killed in an accident, at least one chance in five of suffering lung disease. He also can figure on suffering three or four injuries severe enough to keep him off the job. An airplane pilot can get insurance at standard rates; a coal miner cannot...
...fire and explosion and roof falls kill fewer men than the slow stifling black lung disease-coal workers' pneumoconiosis, in proper medical terminology. "Black lung" is just that: a lung so clogged with the steady accumulation of coal particles that it no longer functions. When both of a miner's lungs are coal-black and completely clogged, they stop functioning, and he dies. The process, being cumulative, is slow and agonizing. The U. S. Public Health Service estimates that 125,000 miners-active and retired-are afflicted with black lung: and admits that the figure may be conservative, because reports...
...reports vary because until very recently the states Weren't taking the trouble to compensate men for black lung. Until 1969 only three states recognized the disease in their Workmen's Compensation statutes, and only one state. Pennsylvania, was actually systematic about diagnosing black lung and compensating for it. Pennsylvania reports that about 1100 miners are dying of the disease every year. That's one state. There are 23,000 working miners in Pennsylvania: nearly twice that many in West Virginia, which is the nation's leading coal-mining state and which, until 1969, operated under Workmen's Compensation laws...
What was the excuse? It wasn't that the disease wasn't known about. Although the Public Health Service didn't begin research on black lung until 1963. British doctors had identified the disease as far back as 1813. It wasn't that the disease was declining thanks to automation. On the contrary, the disease was on the increase. Automated machinery creates much more coal dust than picks and shovels ever did, and coal machinery operators breathe more dust on every shift than men working half a century ago breathed in a week...
Lonergan, who attended the congress sessions in a seldom-varying uniform of plaid sports shirt, slacks and windbreaker, listened attentively to both praise and criticism. At 65, with only one lung, he was remarkably energetic throughout the grueling week-long conference, dutifully setting aside spare moments to read many of the 700,000 words that participants had written about him. "I don't care whether they agree with me or dis agree with me," he said. "What matters is that they are here, talking with each other." Seminarian Joseph Collins, a well-to-do young activist who personally paid...