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Coal miners in West Virginia no longer have access to free black lung screenings amid budget cuts mandated by President Donald Trump, CBS News reports.
For decades, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has offered coal miners free screenings for black lung, a chronic disease caused by prolonged exposure to coal dust. Screenings have now stopped due to Trump-mandated cuts.
Marion Tennant, a longtime miner in West Virginia's coal country, said he's fearful of the future for younger workers.
"What's going to happen, I'm afraid, is your young ones, before they realize what they've done to their body, they're gonna have black lung, and the numbers is going to rise," Tennant said.
Catherine Blackwood, a PhD scientist at the NIOSH facility in Morgantown, West Virginia, said she was among the over 200 people who were fired last month. The terminated jobs include those for overseeing mine safety and studying cancer-causing chemicals in firefighters.
"Every single person faces different hazards at their work every day. And without NIOSH, I think that we are all in danger," Blackwood said.
The Trump administration is set to terminate all NIOSH staffers in the coming months, leaving the future of health screenings and other programs at risk.
In response to the cuts, a Health and Human Services spokesperson said in a statement: "The department remains focused on cutting wasteful bureaucracy and eliminating duplicative administrative roles."
Blackwood made it clear that "the work being done at NIOSH was not wasteful."
"It was not duplicative. It was not redundant. The research that was being done at NIOSH was being done nowhere else in the world."
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