Autopsy of miner denied claims shows he suffered from severe case of black lung disease

Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Labor told more than 1,100 coal miners that their compensation for black-lung disease may have been wrongly denied, after it was discovered that Dr. Paul S. Wheeler, the head of the unit at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions who interprets X-rays in black-lung claims, failed to find a single case of severe black lung in more than 1,500 cases decided since 2000 in which he offered an opinion. Chris Hamby, who broke the story in a report for The Center for Public Integrity, won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Steve Day

One miner who was denied claims based on Wheeler's opinion was Steve Day, who worked West Virginia coal mines for nearly 35 years, before dying in July from what more than a dozen other doctors had diagnosed as black lung disease, Hamby writes for BuzzFeed. "Today, however, there is final and overwhelming evidence that Wheeler was wrong: Steve’s autopsy."

"The doctor who performed the autopsy found extensive black lung," Hamby writes. "With the permission of Steve’s family, I shared his autopsy report with three leading doctors who specialize in black lung and related diseases. Each said essentially the same thing: Steve had one of the most severe cases of black lung they had seen."

Dr. Francis Green, a professor of medicine at the University of Calgary and one of the world’s top experts on the pathology of black lung, told Hamby, “A majority of his lungs had been replaced by scar tissue with coal dust." When Hamby contacted Wheeler he referred all questions to his legal team.

"In late September, a Labor Department claims examiner issued an award of benefits," Hamby writes. "But this is only a first step in what is usually a protracted process of appeals. Indeed, Steve also had won at this initial level in 2005. The company that employed Steve, now a subsidiary of Patriot Coal Corp., appealed that decision, leading to the denial of the claim by a judge. Patriot refused to say whether it would continue to fight Steve’s current claim."

Of the 1,500 cases in which Wheeler said there was no black lung disease, often saying he saw other diseases, such as tuberculosis or a fungal infection, "doctors saw the advanced form of the disease in 390 of these cases," Hamby writes. "Overall during that time, which is as far back as digital records go, miners have lost more than 800 cases after other doctors saw black lung on an X-ray but Wheeler graded the film as negative."

"And that’s only counting the cases that made it to the second stage in the claims process—a hearing before an administrative law judge—and not cases that were denied at the initial level," Hamby writes. "Decisions at that early stage are not publicly available." (Read more)