03/10/2014
【長榮職安電子報 第70期】(下)
【The Tragic Recurrence of Debilitating Black Lung Disease】
The negative health and environmental impacts of our nation’s continued reliance on coal as a fuel source for power plants appropriately receives significant attention in the media and in public policy debates.
For the past 40 years, NIOSH has conducted surveys and monitored trends in the prevalence of coal miners' pneumoconiosis (also known as black lung disease), including progressive massive fibrosis (PMF), the worst form of the disease. PMF is an advanced, debilitating, and lethal form of black lung with no cure and limited treatment options. NIOSH researchers note while the prevalence of this devastating disease in long-term underground miners had essentially been eliminated in the late 1990s, by 2012 it had rebounded to a level ten times higher than those 15 years earlier to levels not seen since the early 1970s.
So what’s behind the stunning increase in this severe form of black lung disease? The NIOSH researchers note that “excessive inhalation of coal mine dust is the sole cause of PMF in working coal miners, so this increase can only be the result of overexposures and/or increased toxicity stemming from changes in dust composition.” They go on to conclude that “despite readily available dust control technology and best practices guidance, recent findings suggest dust exposures have not been adequately controlled and that a substantial portion of U.S. coal miners continue to develop PMF.”
Corporate malfeasance and a lack of enforcement by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) may also be factors in the increase in PMF and other mining-related diseases.
MSHA’s revised coal dust exposure limit isn’t scheduled to take effect until August 2016, which means another two years in which exposures to the current unhealthy levels of coal dust will be legally acceptable. With respect to the 154 PMF cases in miners documented by NIOSH between 1998 and 2012, the authors note in their letter that “each of these cases is a tragedy and represents a failure among all those responsible for preventing this severe disease.”
資料來源:NIOSH
詳情資料網址: http://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/13221
The negative health and environmental impacts of our nation’s continued reliance on coal as a fuel..