Nationalisation of the coal industry by the 1945 Labour Government provided Britain with a unique opportunity for preventing the disablement of coal miners. At that time several thousand miners received disability benefits each year for pneumoconiosis in South Wales alone, and the Medical Research Council had started an important series of investigations into the relationships between dust expo...

Although rates of pneumoconiosis in coal miners have declined substantially in the United States since the passage of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, new cases continue to occur, including cases of rapidly progressive disease. In contrast, Australia’s underground coal mining industry has reported few new cases of pneumoconiosis for more than 20 years. Mortality from coal wo...

BACKGROUND Particulate exposure from air pollution increases the risk of ischemic heart disease (IHD) mortality. Although coal miners are highly exposed to coal dust particulate, studies of IHD mortality risk among coal miners have had inconsistent results. Previous studies may have been biased by the healthy worker effect. METHODS We examined the dose-response relationship between cumulative...

The production environment of coal mine is complex and tough, so once dangerous situation appears it requires coal miners take accurate and effective emergency measures. Actually, the occurrence and further expansion of a large number of mining accidents are associated with coal miners’ mishandling of emergency. Therefore, evaluating coal miners’ emergency response capacity is the significant w...

healthy hire effect (hhe) is considered as an epidemiological phenomenon, complicating the assessment of a true cause - effect relationship between occupational exposure and health status of workers. the current study was aimed at identification and elimination of hhe in the risk assessment of arterial hypertension (ah) in coal miners. overall, 1553 miners, working in west siberia, were enrolle...

AIMS To investigate the early pattern of longitudinal change in forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) among new Chinese coal miners, and the relation between coal mine dust exposure and the decline of lung function. METHODS The early pattern of lung function changes in 317 newly hired Chinese underground coal miners was compared to 132 referents. This three year prospective cohort study...

OBJECTIVE To investigate if blood Cu++/Zn++ superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase, catalase, and total plasma antioxidant activities could be markers of biological activity resulting from exposure to respirable coal mine dust in active miners, and of pneumoconiosis in retired miners. METHODS Blood samples were randomly obtained from active surface workers (n = 30) and underground miner...

The residual volume and total lung capacity of 1,455 working Pennsylvania coal miners were determined as part of a larger epidemiological study. The age of the subjects varied between 18 and 65 with a mean of 48-7 years. The total lung capacity of the subjects was determined from standard posteroanterior and lateral chest films while the forced vital capacity was determined by spirometry (O'She...

OBJECTIVES Current diagnostic standards of pneumoconiosis, which is the most serious occupational disease in China, are based on film-screen radiography (FSR). However, parenchymal structure overlap limits the sensitivity of FSR in the clinic. High-resolution computerized tomography (HRCT) has the advantage of identifying nodular pulmonary parenchymal changes. In this study, we aimed to compare...

BACKGROUND Clinical and epidemiological studies have given discordant results on the usefulness of the level of circulating elastin peptide (EP), a potential marker of both elastin destruction (a key phenomenon in pulmonary emphysema) and neosynthesis, for assessing structural changes in the lung extracellular matrix. The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between levels o...