Black lung ‘failures’

A SCATHING report has exposed the catastrophic failure of every authority charged with keeping the state’s miners safe from the preventable but deadly black lung disease.

The Government ignored its own laws meant to keep safe those toiling in dangerous and dusty conditions as a host of medical professionals failed to diagnose and treat miners now dying from the disease.

And the chance to act 13 years ago, when a miner was diagnosed with a disease thought to be eradicated in the 1980s, was missed.

The interim parliamentary report of the Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis Select Committee yesterday condemned the Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Queensland Health, Work-Cover, mine operators, health professionals and others for 30 years of failure