Word: lunged
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...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...
...could say there weren't ways to prevent or control the disease. The British began paying compensation for black lung in 1943, and ten years later, faced with staggering compensation payments, began putting dust-control techniques into effect, he result was quantifiable: 4,000 British miners suffering from black lung in 195?: 740 in 1967. That works out to ?.8 cases of black lung for every 1,000 miners...
Here? by comparison, the Public Health Service figures that one out of every ten active miners has black lung to a debilitating degree, and one out of every five retired miners. In Eastern Ken?u?ky, plagued by every kind of trouble known to men in poverty, the government recently estimated that 27,000 men have the disease. The irony is great. Most of Eastern Ken?ucky's mines are played out: the coal is gone; the men, unwanted, are on welfare: but black lung stays with them...
Tell me, you there, brother, how much longer do you think you're going to live? You got the black lung! You can't walk ten steps without resting. You can't breathe. You spit up black juice. But the company says you just got compensationitis! You're dying! And the killing will go on until you tell them to grant you compensation and clean up the miners or there won't be any coal coming out of West Virginia...