A Collaboration Between Journalists and OEHS Professionals to Protect Workers
By Abby Roberts
Until 2018, many experts in government and industry believed coal workers’ pneumoconiosis to be in decline in the United States. Due to stricter regulations and more effective personal protective equipment, this progressive, incurable lung disease associated with inhalation of coal dust, also known as black lung, was thought to be a relic of the mid-20th century. But in a series of investigations conducted over 12 years, journalist Howard Berkes helped show that the disease was not only extant but increasing among Appalachian coal miners. During his May 19 Upton Sinclair lecture at AIHA Connect 2025, Berkes discussed how his investigations, collectively titled “Coal’s Deadly Dust,” led to a NIOSH study on black lung and stricter regulations for coal miners’ exposures to silica. Furthermore, Berkes asserted that increased collaboration between journalists, impacted workers, and occupational and environmental health and safety professionals will lead to stronger workplace safety regulations.
Berkes, now retired, was an NPR correspondent for 48 years. Over the course of his career, he covered engineers’ attempts to prevent the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, an ethics scandal during Salt Lake City’s 2002 Winter Olympics bid, and a range of issues related to occupational health and safety. In 2012, he and fellow investigative journalist Chris Hamby published a series of articles titled “Black Lung Returns to Coal Country,” covering how black lung disease was being diagnosed in younger miners and progressing more quickly to severe stages. Berkes left to cover the 2012 Olympics, but Hamby would document the investigation in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Soul Full of Coal Dust.
In 2016, Berkes said, he returned to covering black lung disease after a source texted him, claiming that “black lung clinics are slammed.” The source, a clinician, had seen a dramatic increase in progressive massive fibrosis, also known as complicated black lung disease. Berkes and the clinician convinced NIOSH respiratory health specialist Scott Laney, PhD, to visit the clinician’s workplace and view the chest x-rays of miners diagnosed with complicated black lung disease. Alarmed, Laney returned to NIOSH, and the agency launched its own investigation of black lung disease. But although Laney wanted to collaborate with Berkes further, CDC did not allow them to communicate officially until after the NIOSH study was published, according to Berkes. While Berkes continued to document the disease’s impact, he felt this decision prevented him from telling the story with NIOSH’s full participation.
In addition to regulatory agency personnel such as Laney, Berkes’ sources included people in politics, academia, and medicine. “We had what I think is really a symbiotic relationship,” he said. “But the most important sources for any workplace safety story are the people deeply affected by them.” For this story, the affected people were coal miners with complicated black lung disease, many of whom Berkes interviewed. He sought not only to quantify black lung but to portray the disease’s devastating impact on individual miners. Interviewing impacted workers “anchors us in what we are documenting as a monumental regulatory failure,” Berkes added.
Berkes’ work was also assisted by collaboration with the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). The agency provided 30 years of data to Berkes’ team, who cleaned and analyzed it. Beginning in 2018, Berkes and his colleagues published their findings that an “epidemic” of complicated black lung disease, affecting thousands more miners than were documented in federal monitoring programs, had resulted from mining thinner coal seams embedded in silica-containing sandstone. The Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Labor performed its own analysis of the cleaned-up data and called on MSHA to improve its efforts to protect miners from silica. Ultimately, Berkes said, this led to MSHA’s final rule lowering the permissible exposure limit for silica in all mines.
“There was tougher and direct regulation of silica dust, finally,” Berkes said, although he noted that enforcement of MSHA’s silica rule is currently on hold due to the disruption caused by the Trump administration’s unforeseen restructuring of NIOSH. “There was documentation of the epidemic that was hidden,” he continued. Other outcomes of Berkes’ collaboration with coal miners and federal regulators included scientific studies, congressional hearings, and requirements for black lung clinics to digitize their records.
He concluded by stating that journalists often cover stories on topics unfamiliar to them, so they greatly value experts’ help. “What we’re reporting is new for us,” he said. “We need help understanding.”
When journalists and OEHS experts work together, he added, “workers who are facing harm benefit.”
Abby Roberts is assistant editor of The Synergist.
