Sep 19, 2014 4 min read

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:

No man should die from coal mining, be it from a methane explosion, a roof collapse or black lung – coal-miner’s pneumoconiosis.

The Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, among other things, set standards to reduce dust and created the Black Lung Disability Trust to compensate miners who contracted this disease.

The law worked. Over time there was a 90 percent reduction in miners with this ailment. What was accepted by some people as an occupational hazard became unacceptable and companies changed their practices.

But since the 1990s, black lung rebounded, researchers with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said.

The numbers are still well below the level 45 years ago, when the law passed, but the numbers don’t matter. The number of incidences must go down until it is eradicated like smallpox.

Coal companies must do better to protect their workers. If this means better training, do so. If this means better enforcement of safety rules, do so. If that means earlier testing and treatment, do so.

Better self-policing is the best way to avoid government intervention.

The Ebola virus is one of the least understood but most deadly viruses on the African continent, spreading rapidly if not checked in its early stages. The current outbreak threatens to become a continental pandemic.

Initially, health officials thought the outbreak was contained along the Liberia-Guinea border, but with people traveling to escape it or to conduct business, the virus spread to other regions. Now, African nations are asking for greater assistance from the West.

The United States and United Kingdom are ramping up assistance in the form of medical equipment and military aid, including setting up clinics.

The Obama administration is preparing to assign 3,000 U.S. military personnel to the afflicted region to supply medical and logistical support to overwhelmed local health care systems and to boost the number of beds needed to isolate and treat victims of the epidemic.

Studies show more and more people are migrating globally in search of better lives, and diseases will travel with some of them.

A more coordinated and well-funded response to easily spread diseases is becoming mandatory. The risks of piecemeal responses are too dangerous to consider.

The economy is on the road to recovery since mid-2009, when the Great Recession officially ended. But, for most Americans, recovery is not there yet, and, at the recent rate of progress, it won’t be for a long time, if ever.

New census data on income and poverty, released Tuesday, show that median household income barely budged in 2013 for the second year in a row, following two consecutive annual declines. At nearly $52,000, it is still 8 percent below its level in 2007 before the recession. In all, median household income in America is 8.6 percent below its peak in 2000.

Even positive news in the report is overwhelmed by dismaying longer-term trends. The poverty rate fell from 15 percent in 2012 to 14.5 percent in 2013, the first meaningful year-to-year decline in seven years. (The poverty threshold for a family of four in 2013 was $23,834.) But the rate is still well above its levels of 12.5 percent in 2007 and 11.3 in 2000. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has calculated, at the recent pace of poverty reduction, it would take until 2020 for the rate to fall below the level in 2000.

Progress toward economic health was and continues to be slow and unreliable. That’s because the policy response never was and probably never will be commensurate with the damage caused by the serial recessions and poor recoveries since 2000.