The Lead Dust program is a follow up of the soil remediation campaign that was done by the EPA. Started in 1999, the campaign was a clean-up effort to reduce the amount of land and homes with high levels of lead. Now, the program is ran by City of Omaha. The Lead Dust program resource is in charge of going to the houses that have had the soil remediation processes completed and providing education.
They provide knowledge on lead poisoning prevention. And will offer a free Heppa vacuum in the case that lead dust is present in the home. The program also offers a free inspection to homes that were built before 1978, when there’s a child living in the home under the age of 7.
Naudia McCracken, acting lead program supervisor for the Douglas County Health Department said the education is provided in person, through handout materials that explain what lead is, where it is found in the homes and sources of exposure in addition to lead base paint and water.
All handout materials are translated in key languages such as Spanish, Nepali, Burmese and Karen. The program also has two employees who are able to speak Spanish, a great resource says Naudia. For other languages they contract out with Lutheran Family Services.
“21 percent of our cases are coming from our refugee immigrant population, where it is not linked to lead base paint or soil” but instead to imported products said McCracken. The process of educating the family is done through handouts. An evaluation survey is given to determine pre-education and a post education, allowing the Lead Dust program to evaluate how they are giving the information.
The majority of the children that are poisoned are between the ages one and three, although cases outside of that age range do happened, said McCracken.
Watie White, artist and activist for lead awareness experienced lead poisoning when his infant became ill.
White was approached by Kara Eastman with the Omaha Healthy Kids Alliance, an organization that provides education to families on how to create a healthy home, with the idea to collaborated. “Pretty quickly the idea became that we would build this content that would be people who had some sort of personal story to tell about lead poisoning,” said White. And so, Lead Series Stories was brought to life. A portrait project that puts a face to lead poisoning and shows it can affect anyone.
Omaha has seen a decrease in children being exposed to lead. Currently there is less than 1% incident cases in Douglas county and in the Omaha superfund site.
