California’s silicosis outbreak among artificial stone workers has surged sharply, with reported cases jumping from 47 from 2019 through 2022 to 571 from 2023 through August of this year. The new tally shows how quickly a deadly, incurable lung disease has taken hold among the people cutting artificial-stone countertops.
The burden is falling overwhelmingly on Latino men, who account for about 98% of the cases, according to the California Department of Public Health. About half the cases have been reported in L.A. County, and the state has now tracked 32 workers who died of the disease since 2019.
David Michaels, a public health expert cited in the study, said the pattern leaves little doubt about the product itself. Engineered stone countertops, he said, cannot be manufactured safely and economically in a way that protects workers from the microscopic silica dust inside the slabs. That dust cuts up the inside of the lungs until the organs fail.
The rise is especially stark because the hazard was known before the boom in artificial stone fabricating. OSHA first issued an occupational silica standard in 2016, but the fabrication of artificial-stone countertops was still very new then. In other words, the safeguards arrived at the same time the industry was beginning to expand, not after it had already matured.
The disease is also moving faster than silicosis seen in other jobs. Michaels said it is progressing much more rapidly in these workers, leading to earlier deaths and severe disability. The state’s figures point to that severity: the median age of diagnosis is 46, the median age at death is 52, and workers identified in the study reported 16 to 25 years of silica dust exposure on the job.
Even transplantation has not broken the pattern. California has tracked 72 workers who have undergone lung transplants and 51 who have been referred for transplant evaluations, a staggering share of the sickest cases. Michaels said the percentage of workers who have received or are awaiting transplants is astoundingly high.
The broader picture is already clear. The San Fernando Valley is the epicenter of California’s artificial-stone-cutting industry, and researchers say engineered stone countertops have driven a new epidemic of silicosis. What remains unresolved is how many more workers will be exposed before the industry changes, because the science now points to a harsh conclusion: without a fundamentally different way to make these slabs, the dust keeps winning.
