The Berrien County Health Department is receiving a $280,000 grant from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to conduct blood tests for lead in anyone age 16 or younger. The board of health accepted the grant this week, and Berrien County Acting Health Officer Guy Miller tells WSJM News this will bolster work the department already does to monitor lead exposure.
“We do this work of lead case management,” Miller said. “We have a registered nurse that can go out to homes and help with home inspections, help with applications to have homes mitigated for lead, and usually these nurses are going out into the community where somebody has had a high level of blood lead.”
Miller says this grant will be added to the county’s emerging threats fund so more lead testing can be done by the department itself.
“The Berrien County Health Department, we’re looking at getting our own testing equipment so we don’t have to send those tests out, and we are hoping to increase the number of tests. That number has been down, the number of people being tested for lead levels throughout the pandemic.”
And now the focus is returning to lead response. The water crisis in Benton Harbor prompted the state grant, although Miller says the funds can be used for testing countywide. When someone is found with elevated blood lead levels, follow up to reduce lead exposure begins. Miller says in extreme cases, a person could be hospitalized, although that rarely happens.
