After five to 10 years of dust exposure, an X-ray will likely show shadows in the lungs of most people. Xie Zhengyi / For China Daily

When He Chunrong was given a computer by a friend, she went online and searched for information to help her husband, Lu Quanjun, who has suffered from pneumoconiosis for years.

"Nobody we knew was willing to help any more," He recalls, adding the treatment of his illness was putting his family into debt.

She wrote e-mails to Deng Jianghu, a man they happened to meet at hospital, whose father is also a pneumoconiosis patient.

To her surprise, Deng told her she might get help from a charity program he was working for.

Love Save Pneumoconiosis was started by China Social Assistance Foundation and Wang Keqin, a well known journalist, in June 2011.

The program asks for donations for pneumoconiosis patients, who suffer partly because of a lack of access to information about the disease.

About 200 people work for the program full time or part time, and nearly all of them are volunteers.

Zhang Hongping, a volunteer in charge of publicity, is an international journalism student from Beijing Foreign Studies University.

"I knew little about pneumoconiosis until I took part in the program," Zhang says. "Now I realize the hard life pneumoconiosis patients and their families lead, and I want to help."

The organization has received donations totalling 2.2 million yuan ($348,000).

The money goes directly into the account of the China Social Assistance Foundation to be allocated to families. Other donations, such as clothes, are sent directly to patients, whose addresses are on the website and micro blogs.

By the end of November 2011, 53 patients had received donations from the organization.