COAL WORKERS' HEALTH SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM

Public Data

As part of its ongoing respiratory disease surveillance program, NIOSH publishes periodic updates on patterns, trends, distributions, and clusters of medical outcomes of concern. Three of these reports concerned underground coal miners. The first, Rapidly Progressive Coal Workers' Pneumoconiosis in the United States: Geographic Clustering and Other Factors (Antao V C dos S, E Petsonk, L Sokolow, A Wolfe, G Pinheiro, J Hale, and M Attfield. Occup Environ Med. 2005 October; 62(10): 670–674) examined patterns of rapid disease progression in the various coal fields around the United States. The second, Advanced Cases of Coal Workers' Pneumoconiosis - Two Counties, Virginia, 2006 (MMWR. August 25, 2006 / 55(33);909-913) focused on 328 underground coal miners medically examined as part of the

Enhanced Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program (ECWHSP) and provided additional details on 11 coal miners who exhibited rapid progression of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP) to severe disease. The third, Advanced Pneumoconiosis Among Working Underground Coal Miners - Eastern Kentucky and Southwestern Virginia, 2006 (MMWR. July 6, 2007 / 56(26);652-655) provided a similar report of data for 975 participants from the ECWXSP but from a wider geographical area. This web page serves to provide the underlying data from these three reports. The files are provided in comma separated values (CSV) and SAS® format. In order to prevent identification of individuals, data for cells from <5 individuals have been excluded. For this reason, statistics calculated from these data, and the number of observations may be slightly different to those reported in the above publications.

Publication	Data (ZIP file includes Data Dictionary, CSV, and SAS)
Rapidly Progressive Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis in the United States: Geographic Clustering and Other Factors	RapidProgression.zip
Advanced Cases of Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis - Two Counties, Virginia, 2006	CaseStudy.zip
Advanced Pneumoconiosis Among Working Underground Coal Miners – Eastern Kentucky and Southeastern Virginia	Kentucky-Virginia.zip

Additional information of relevance to coal workers’ respiratory disease is listed below.

 

NIOSH publications

Criteria for a recommended standard: Occupational exposure to respirable coal mine dust (DHHS (NIOSH) Publication No. 1995-106)

NIOSH Docket Number 242 contains the comments and responses for publication number 1995-106.

The above criteria document relied heavily on two NIOSH exposure-response analyses of CWP, published as An Investigation into the Relationship Between Coal Workers' Pneumoconiosis and Dust Exposure in U.S. Coal Miners (MD Attfield and K Morring, Am Ind Hyg Assoc J (1992), 53, 486-492) and Prevalence of Pneumoconiosis and its Relationship to Dust Exposure in a Cohort of U.S. Bituminous Coal Miners and Ex-Miners (MD Attfield and NS Seixas, Am J Ind Med (1995), 27:137-151). The primary data pertaining to these analyses are available below in CSV and SAS format. A small minority of the data have been excluded for cells having <5 individuals in order to maintain confidentiality.

Publication	Data (ZIP file includes Data Dictionary, CSV, and SAS)
An Investigation into the Relationship Between Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis and Dust Exposure in U.S. Coal Miners	NCSR1.zip
Prevalence of Pneumoconiosis and its Relationship to Dust Exposure in a Cohort of U.S. Bituminous Coal Miners and Ex-Miners	NCSR4.zip

Current Intelligence Bulletin 64: Coal Mine Dust Exposures and Associated Health Outcomes - A Review of Information Published Since 1995 (DHHS (NIOSH) Publication No. 2011-172)

NIOSH Docket Number 210 contains the comments and responses for publication number 2011-172.

 

CWP Statistics

NIOSH has an interactive query system for coal worker’s pneumoconiosis, the CWHSP Data Query System . Using this, individuals can obtain statistics on CWP occurrence by state, year, age, and tenure. Users should note, however that this system is currently being revised and that statistics generated in the future may not agree exactly with those from the current version. The differences arise from variations in the strategy used to deal with multiple radiographs from the same miner.

New data will be added annually, and due to the dynamic nature of data collection, which includes error correction and the addition of missing information, query system data are subject to change.

More statistics on CWP and related exposures can be found in the NIOSH Work-Related Lung Disease Surveillance System (eWoRLD) .

 

Contact CWHSP

Email cwhsp@cdc.gov if you have questions.