Black lung in Queensland existed when disease was thought to be eradicated: expert
By Nick Wiggins
Updated yesterday at 10:49pm
An internationally renowned expert on black lung has told an inquiry the disease was likely continuing to cause the deaths of Queensland coal miners during the decades it was thought to have been eradicated.
Key points:
* Expert says authorities looking for black lung weren't vigilant * Death rate from disease likely to be higher than first thought * Workers' X-rays discovered in Ipswich shipping container
Nineteen cases of black lung have been confirmed in Queensland
[...]
At the same time in the US, black lung was continuing to show up as a cause of death on former coal workers' death certificates.
Dr Cohen said people weren't vigilant about looking for it.
"If you don't take X-rays well or don't look at the X-rays, you won't find disease in your population and you don't have to do anything about it," he said.
Deputy committee chair and LNP MP Lawrence Springborg asked whether it was true as many as 70,000 former coal workers in the US had black lung listed as contributing to their death on their death certificate.
"Those numbers were significant underestimates" Dr Cohen replied.
He said that it was likely black lung contributed to the deaths of many Queensland miners.
In Trump Budget, More for Military, as His Supporters May Lose out By PETER BAKERMARCH 15, 2017
To construct an “America First” budget, the initial trade-off for President Trump was fairly obvious: The military and veterans would get more of what they want or need, while diplomats and foreign countries would have to make do with less.
But in his first spending blueprint since taking office, Mr. Trump also made choices demonstrating that parts of America will be more first than others — and some of the budget losers, it turns out, may be some of the very constituencies that have been most supportive of the new president during his improbable rise to power.
While border guards will have more prisons to lock up unauthorized immigrants, rural communities will lose grants and loans to build water facilities and financing to keep their airports open. As charter schools are bolstered, after-school and summer programs will lose money. As law enforcement agents get more help to fight the opioid epidemic, lower-income Americans will have less access to home energy aid, job training programs and legal services.
The budget proposal that will be unveiled by Mr. Trump’s White House on Thursday represents the most dramatic shift in how national resources are divvied up of any presidential spending plan since Ronald Reagan. In his rhetoric both before the election and since his inauguration, Mr. Trump outlined a vision of a country getting back to basics, tapping into a visceral sense among many Americans that Washington has been too generous with taxpayer money spent wastefully both at home and abroad while doing nothing to alleviate what he called the “American carnage.” The budget is his first attempt to translate that into concrete reality.
Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget FEB. 17, 2017 Mr. Trump wants to slash deeply into domestic and international programs to pay for a large military buildup and protect Social Security and Medicare without increasing the deficit or raising major taxes. As a practical matter, the budget may stand little chance of passing intact. But as a political statement, it represents a new way of doing business.
“To keep Americans safe, we have made the tough choices that have been put off for too long,” Mr. Trump wrote in the introduction to the budget proposal. “But we have also made the necessary investments that are long overdue.”
Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump’s budget would sharply ratchet back American investment in the outside world. The United States would cut back financing for international peacekeeping missions, humanitarian assistance, cultural exchanges, refugee assistance and third world development. The United Nations, the World Bank and other institutions would no longer find themselves as flush with American dollars.
What his budget proposal makes clear, however, is that such cuts, deep as they are, would not be enough by themselves to pay for his reinvestment in the armed forces, meaning that Mr. Trump had to turn to programs that might be defined by others as America-first in their orientation and goals.
The tough choices he promised would eliminate longstanding staples of American life.
Gone would be federal financing for public television, the arts and humanities. Federal support for long-distance Amtrak train service would be eliminated. Washington would get out of the business of helping clean up the Chesapeake Bay or the Great Lakes.
While he may not care about East Coast elites upset about ending financing for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, some of the agencies and programs that would be “zeroed out” are institutions in parts of the country that Mr. Trump won last November.
Among the agencies to be cut off, for instance, would be the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state agency founded in 1965 to promote economic development and infrastructure in some of the poorest parts of the United States.
Mr. Trump and his aides argue that many of these programs have long since passed their usefulness or would be better off run and paid for at the state or local level. While he talked about the ravaged inner cities in his Inaugural Address, Mr. Trump would eliminate $3 billion in funding for the Community Development Block Grant program that helps provide affordable housing. The president argued in his budget that “the program is not well targeted to the poorest populations and has not demonstrated results.”
Similarly, federal support for rural airports should go, he argued, because it was originally conceived of as a temporary program nearly 40 years ago to provide subsidized commercial air service to communities that otherwise would not have flights.
With the cost per passenger so high, Mr. Trump’s budget argues that some of these communities are close enough to major airports that they do not need their own or that they “could be served by other existing modes of transportation.”
The sharpest domestic cuts would scale back the Environmental Protection Agency, which Mr. Trump believes has hamstrung economic growth with excessive regulation.
Under his plan, funding would be eliminated for international climate change programs, climate change research and President Barack Obama’s plan to force power plants to limit their carbon emissions.
More than 50 other E.P.A. programs would be eliminated, including those assisting Alaskan native villages and communities along the Mexican border. Funding for Superfund cleanups of hazardous waste sites would be reduced by about a third.
“These cuts are sensible and rational,” Mr. Trump wrote in his budget message about his overall approach. “Every agency and department will be driven to achieve greater efficiency and to eliminate wasteful spending in carrying out their honorable service to the American people.”
Even with that, Mr. Trump would make no progress toward his campaign promise to reduce not only the annual budget deficit but the accumulated national debt. During the election, he said he could eliminate in just eight years the entire $20 trillion in debt that the nation has built up over generations.
But he offered no plans to reduce the deficit in this proposal, simply offsetting $54 billion in increased military spending with $54 billion in domestic and international cuts.
As a result, the nation next year will continue to spend more than it takes in through taxes and therefore will still add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt.
Mr. Trump made no mention of that in his budget message, but his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, a longtime deficit hawk, did, foreshadowing the tension that will eventually challenge this president as his term progresses. “Our $20 trillion national debt is a crisis, not just for the nation, but for every citizen,” Mr. Mulvaney wrote.
Who Wins and Loses in Trump’s Proposed Budget By ALICIA PARLAPIANO and GREGOR AISCH UPDATED MARCH 16, 2016
President Trump released a partial outline of his 2018 budget on Thursday, proposing billions of dollars in spending cuts to most government agencies to pay for large increases in military and homeland security spending, resulting in a 1.2 percent cut in discretionary spending over all.
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