The U.S. Department of Energy is expanding its beryllium disease screening program to include employees of now-defunct companies -- including two near Pittsburgh -- that handled the space-age material used in nuclear weapons.

Inhalation of beryllium dust can cause an incurable lung disease.

Up to 50 workers at McDanel Refractory Co. in Beaver Falls and 125 at Vitro Manufacturing in Canonsburg are among an estimated 30,000 former employees of 24 companies that had contracts with the government.

Yesterday's policy change announcement by John Shaw, assistant secretary of Energy for Environment, Health and Safety, expands the medical screening program DOE has offered to its own contract employees since 1991.

The department will transfer $3.5 million from other programs to cover the cost of the expanded testing over the next several years, Shaw said. The program will last as long as the workers are still alive and workers are entitled to as many follow-up tests as they feel necessary.

"I encourage all workers to go and get the test done," Shaw said. "DOE is committed to finding these workers, who were heroes of the Cold War. We feel we're doing what is right and we're so glad to be able to do it."

Mike Waldron, a DOE spokesman, said the department has no way of knowing how many of the 30,000 people who worked with beryllium at its vendor companies are still alive. The estimate of those affected by the program expansion is based on raw employee records from those companies during the years they had government contracts.

The McDanel Refractory operated through the 1940s, fabricating oddly shaped beryllium crucibles and beryllium stopper rods for the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb.

Vitro's Canonsburg plant was a major uranium milling operation, which operated from 1942 to 1957. From 1957 to 1967 it was used as a storage site, and workers may have been exposed to beryllium-contaminated dust left behind by the earlier operation.

Beryllium is safe in solid form, but machining the light, steel-gray metal produces a toxic dust that can cause an incurable, often fatal lung disease. Nationwide, an estimated 1,200 people exposed to the dust have been diagnosed with the disease since the 1940s.

Former employees of Vitro Manufacturing and McDanel Refractory who want to participate in the voluntary Beryllium Surveillance Screening Program should contact the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education at 1-866-219-3442 for directions on how to make arrangements. The screening consists of a simple blood test.

If a screened individual receives a positive diagnosis for beryllium disease, he or she can get additional medical monitoring and compensation through the Department of Labor under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness compensation program.

Health problems attributed to working with beryllium gained public attention six years ago. News reports showed that the federal government and the beryllium industry risked the lives of thousands of workers by knowingly allowing them to be exposed to levels of beryllium many times higher than the federal health standards allowed. As a result, many contracted chronic beryllium disease and some died.

News reports also have documented how the federal government helped kill a 1975 health rule that would have imposed tighter limits on the amount of beryllium dust allowed in manufacturing plants.

Since 1991, more than 43,000 people who worked with beryllium have been screened for chronic beryllium disease, and 962 have been identified to have beryllium sensitization. Of those, 248, or a little more than half a percent of all those screened, have been diagnosed with chronic beryllium disease.