The following information on arsenic testing for Minnesota children living near a polluted site in South Minneapolis is from a Minnesota Department of Health press release. PritzkerOlsen, a leading Minnesota personal injury law firm, is providing it here as a public service.

The Minnesota Department of Health is proposing a biomonitoring pilot project to measure arsenic levels in 100 children who live near the CMC Heartland Site in south Minneapolis. Arsenic-containing pesticides were manufactured and stored at the site between 1938 and 1963. The site is an approximately five-acre triangular lot between 28th Street and Hiawatha Avenue on the south and east and railroad tracks and a warehouse to the west.

The pilot project will help to determine whether children in south Minneapolis have elevated levels of arsenic in their bodies. For those children who are found to have elevated arsenic levels, their parents or guardians will be advised to bring the child to a health care provider for follow-up. Also, the family will be given information to help them determine all of the ways they might be exposed to arsenic (including the soil, green-treated lumber, foods, dietary supplements, and cigarette smoke) and to take steps to reduce the exposure in the future.

This pilot project stems from state legislation that was passed in 2007, directing MDH to develop and implement a statewide Environmental Health Tracking and Biomonitoring (EHTB) program.

Environmental health tracking is the ongoing collection, integration, analysis, and dissemination of data on human exposures to chemicals in the environment and on diseases potentially caused or aggravated by those chemicals. Data for environmental health tracking are generally gathered from existing sources, such as statewide surveys and assessments. When tracked over time, environmental health data will help researchers, policy makers, and public health authorities to recognize patterns, identify populations that are most affected, and identify actions to protect public health.

Biomonitoring directly measures the amount of a chemical (or products that the chemical breaks down into) in people’s bodies. In order to measure the chemical, a sample of a person’s urine, hair, blood, or some other body tissue or fluid is tested.

“Biomonitoring measurements can be a good way to determine exposure to a chemical – especially for chemicals that linger in the body – because they indicate the amount of the chemical that actually gets into people, rather than the amount that could potentially get into them,” said Jean Johnson, Environmental Health Tracking & Biomonitoring (EHTB) program director. Biomonitoring data have the potential to show changes in exposures to chemicals over time, to identify and assess groups of people who are at high risk for exposure, and to help decision makers target interventions to reduce exposure to chemicals in the environment. Biomonitoring projects measure only the exposure to chemicals and are not able to determine whether specific illnesses or health conditions are caused by exposure to those chemicals.

Participation in the project is voluntary, however, participants will be chosen based on a number of demographic and exposure factors, in order to yield the most meaningful data for the projects, Johnson said. The project will likely begin in the summer of 2008.

For more information go to www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/tracking.

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