Minnesota company leads manufacturing of quartz countertops that California poised to ban

For decades, the coal mining industry has been reckoning with a disease called black lung. Now a similar condition is disabling and even killing workers who cut artificial stone, for trendy quartz countertops and backsplashes. It's called silicosis, and you get it by breathing in tiny crystals of a mineral called silica.

The nation's largest manufacturer of artificial stone is Cambria, a company based in Minnesota. But California is the epicenter of silicosis cases in the U.S. and regulators in that state could soon ban the making of these products.

For more on what health professionals in California are seeing in silicosis patients, MPR News host Nina Moini talked with Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi. She leads the California Silicosis Support and Research Network at the University of California-San Francisco, where she is an assistant professor of medicine.

MPR News reached out to Cambria, which has faced hundreds of lawsuits related to silicosis, and has not received a response. The company has said repeatedly that it maintains safe working conditions, partly by wetting facilities to keep dust out of the air.