A potentially fatal chronic disease from coal dust has made a comeback in Australia after a three-decade lull, striking in more and more mining workers in the country.
Known as Coal Worker’s Pneumoconiosis (CWP), “black lung” disease results from breathing in coal dust over time, leaving its victims with irreversible lung damage. While there can be a number of years from initial exposure to its onset, the disease in its most advanced form can lead to death.
Eight miners in the state of Queensland have been diagnosed with black lung disease over the last year, with a 38-year-old male as the youngest confirmed case.
These current statistics come 30 years after the illness was believed to have been wiped out in the country, with experts such as the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand saying the disease has been present all along but not actually picked up.
According to a 1984 government survey, there were 75 confirmed or suspected black lung cases in the mining labor force of Queensland alone.
A Senate committee has jumped on the health concern, investigating potential causes, improved detection, and proper treatment. It slammed poor regulation and incompetence in the industry for the re-emergence.
“There has clearly been a significant failure,” said Labor senator Deborah O’Neill, the committee chair who blamed poor dust control and patchy monitoring in mining sites as some additional culprits.
A committee report urged the federal government to put up a nationwide coal dust monitoring group, and Australian states and territories to follow national guidelines for coal dust exposure. It also encouraged creating a fund to provide lifetime assistance for affected workers.
The state’s Mines Minister Anthony Lynham ordered independently reviewing the state’s screening systems in place. The state is currently guided by a five-point program to fight black lung, including revisiting the Coal Mine Workers’ Health Scheme.
Stephen Smyth, Queensland head of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union’s (CFMEU) mining division, said the latest cases of the disease went undetected in company-ordered X-rays in 2015. A recent case, for instance, was diagnosed through a CT scan.
“Australia has one of the world’s best [X-ray] imaging systems but a third world way of analysing it,” lamented Smyth in a Guardian report.
The CFMEU also questioned the accuracy of records maintained by the mining department’s health surveillance unit, which is facing a backlog of 100,000 health assessment forms to be entered into the database.
Because black lung develops long-term, experts said records should be kept on file for at least 30 years.
Sydney-based respiratory doctor Deborah Yates, who has experienced treating the condition in the United Kingdom, called it naïve to expect black lung to develop only in one state. In the United States, for instance, its victims are getting younger and with more dire conditions – partly because of changing technology that could be producing more dust.
Yates criticized the level of secrecy around lung screening results, which she deemed nearly impossible to obtain even by health professionals. She called for creating a central registry that is immune from the intrusion of government and mining employers.
