>>21945727Almost every case of black lung nowadays occurs in smokers. The smoke puts sticky tar in the lungs and the inhaled coal dust mixes with the tar to produce a kind of cement in the lungs.
Coal miners who don't smoke never get black lung anymore because the air quality is vastly improved in coal mines compared to in the old days of continuous and longwall mining, which is when black lung really started: around the 1950s with the switch from conventional (blasting) to continuous mining. Those spinning heads on continuous miners and longwall shears put out way more dust than the old methods of using picks and shovels or blasting the coal to break the seam into rocks.
