(WSJ) – This ‘Frontline’ special investigates the continued toll of the debilitating disease, long a devastating hazard of mining.

“Coal’s Human Cost” begins to feel like a mystery: Mr. Berkes spends many of the opening moments talking with black-lung sufferers and exploring the miseries of the disease, which turns many of the men we see from proud, working-class earners to wheezing depressives—and not without reason. But the more recent phenomena associated with black lung and PMF—that the latter is showing up in younger men, and those with fewer years underground—is tracked to the improvement of mining technology and exhausted mines. (Read More)