Introduction

Dr. Paul Wheeler, the longtime leader of a unit at Johns Hopkins that for decades has read X-rays and CT scans for coal companies defending black lung benefits claims. (ABC News)





The reverberations from a Center for Public Integrity/ABC News investigation continued this week as the U.S. Department of Labor warned its officials to view with skepticism any X-ray readings by a Johns Hopkins University doctor who virtually never diagnoses black lung, a deadly disease that afflicts coal miners.

The news organizations reported last fall that Dr. Paul Wheeler, an associate professor of radiology at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions often hired by coal companies to weigh miners’ claims for federal benefits, had never found the most severe form of the disease among more than 1,500 claims. Johns Hopkins suspended its black lung X-ray reading program promptly after the story was published.

On Monday, in a development first reported by ABC News, the Labor Department issued a bulletin instructing district directors in the department’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs to “take notice” of the journalists’ work and assume Wheeler’s findings in black lung cases are suspect.