Black lung spreads to younger miners due to complications from silica

Kate Morgan reports from the New York Times from a trip across Appalachia to learn about black lung disease's newest manifestation, which implicates silica and is affecting younger miners.  Some key excerpts follow:

Modern miners are contracting [black lung disease] at younger ages and at rates not seen since the 1970s. For 20th-century miners, it could take decades to develop severe black lung. For men of Aundra Brock’s generation, just a few years can be enough. Nationwide, one in 10 working miners is now estimated to have black lung. In the heart of the central Appalachian coal fields, it’s one in five. Often, their disease is more severe, the progression faster. Doctors are seeing larger masses and more scarring in the lungs. Transplants, disability claims and deaths are all on the rise.

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In an old industry, the reasons are modern. Centuries of extraction have altered the landscape, making the mountains more dangerous to mine, researchers say, and the men beneath them vulnerable not just to black lung, but to another lung disease called silicosis.