§247b–3 Education, technology assessment, and epidemiology regarding lead poisoning

Summary

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, through the CDC director, must run a program to teach health workers, support staff, and the public how to prevent lead poisoning in infants and children. The program must include information on the health effects of low-level lead, what causes lead poisoning, and the main steps to prevent it. Within 6 months after October 27, 1992, the Secretary must set up an Interagency Task Force on the Prevention of Lead Poisoning to coordinate federal work. The Task Force will be chaired by the Secretary and include the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and senior staff chosen by those officials. The Task Force must review and coordinate existing agency plans (including the HHS plan dated February 21, 1991; the HUD plan dated December 7, 1990; and the EPA strategy dated February 21, 1991), make a single implementation plan for federally funded activities, share information across agencies, pick priority research and education areas, identify practical and technical limits to prevention, do an annual review of federal prevention programs and send a report by May 1 each year to the Senate Committees on Labor and Human Resources and on Environment and Public Works and to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and coordinate annual budget requests for lead prevention work. The CDC must also, directly or by grants or contracts, fund work to make better and cheaper tests for lead in children, improve ways to measure how common lead poisoning is (including state-level checks), collect data on how many children are affected and their demographic details (including race and ethnicity) and who paid for treatment (including insurance), and do applied research to make prevention programs more effective.