It starts with shortness of breath. Then a cough that won’t go away. These are probably the early stages (and it will get much worse), but even at this point, nothing can be done to stop the disease. It will eventually destroy the lung in which it has taken hold.

Black lung – simply named to describe the appearance of an affected lung – has no cure. Treatment is palliative and will not slow or reverse the damage. It has only one cause: the inhalation of fine coal dust over an extended period. The type of coal dust that is small enough to deposit in a lung is the type that coal miners can inhale on a daily basis. Black lung is a disease that is theirs alone.

As inflammation and scarring of the lung tissue spreads, the cough will start to bring up black mucus and blood. The lesions will get larger and the symptoms eventually will become debilitating. Because of the strain placed on the body, complications such as heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis are a risk.

In time, early death usually will be caused by the disease in its most severe form. When it has overwhelmed the lung, it is called progressive massive fibrosis.

Black lung has killed about 10,000 US coal miners since the turn of this century alone. In Australia, it was said to have been eradicated 60 years ago. It would have been an easy thing to do. Monitor and reduce the amount of coal dust that workers are forced to “eat” in the mining process, and the disease would vanish.

But black lung has not disappeared here. Three Queensland coal miners just received their diagnoses. Instead of eradicating the conditions that cause the disease, it seems that authorities simply stopped looking for it. A recent 7:30 investigation revealed that one hundred thousand or more coal miners’ chest x-rays, collected over decades, sit unexamined in boxes at the mines department.

Mining bosses today are pulling more and more coal out of the ground. They call it a boom. The miners’ union says dust controls haven’t kept up with production levels. In years to come, we might be calling it an epidemic.