A bill that would create a lead poisoning prevention program was advanced from general file March 22.<\/p>\n
LB1038, introduced by Omaha Sen. Brenda Council, originally would have required all students entering kindergarten to have undergone blood-lead testing.<\/p>\n
An Education Committee amendment, adopted 34-0, replaced the bill and instead would authorize the state Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) division of public health to create an education and outreach program for school children.<\/p>\n
Under the program, a coordinated plan to prevent childhood lead poisoning would:
\n\u2022 educate health care providers, child care providers, public school personnel and parents about the risks of lead poisoning;
\n\u2022 provide a standard to be used in identifying elevated blood-lead levels; and
\n\u2022 recommend that a child be tested for elevated blood-lead levels if the child resides in a zip code with a high prevalence of children with elevated blood-lead levels or if the child meets one of the criteria in a screening questionnaire developed by DHHS.<\/p>\n
The amendment specifies that the department would not be required to pay the cost of elevated blood-lead testing except for children who participate in the Medicaid program.<\/p>\n
Senators advanced the bill to select file on a 32-0 vote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A bill that would create a lead poisoning prevention program was advanced from general file March 22. LB1038, introduced by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[123],"class_list":["post-7062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-and-human-services","tag-sen-brenda-council"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7062"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7068,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7062\/revisions\/7068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}