The New Face of Black Lung | Mother Jones.\:
The idea was that even if black lung didn’t disappear there would be a small number of mild cases and virtually no one like Donald and James Marcum, said Dr. Donald Rasmussen, a pioneer in recognizing and diagnosing black lung.
“In 1969, I publicly proclaimed that the disease would go away before we learned more about it,” Rasmussen, now 84 and still diagnosing miners, said in a recent interview at his office in Beckley, West Virgina. “I was dead wrong.”
Throughout the coalfields of Appalachia, in small community clinics and in government labs, it has become clear: Black lung is back.