Belinda Daniels still remembers the panic of 2018, the moment a pediatrician told her 1-year-old son, Jovanni, had lead in his body. She said it didn’t feel like a headline problem—it was her kitchen, her apartment, the daily routines that suddenly carried risk.
Omaha’s testing gap and what it means
Her experience plays out against a patchwork system across Nebraska.
In practice, whether a child gets tested is often left to doctors or individual health systems.
Local public health officials say that’s a problem in a city with deep lead history—including being home to the largest residential lead cleanup site in the country.
For more than a century, smoke from a lead smelter and other factories deposited 400 million pounds of toxic metal across Omaha’s east side.
The Environmental Protection Agency began investigating in 1999 and later declared 27 square miles of east Omaha to be a Superfund site.
Over more than two decades, the EPA and the city have dug up and replaced nearly 14,000 yards from about a third of the site’s residential properties.
Even so, officials say the needle on screening hasn’t moved as far as it should.
Omaha public health staff have tried—billboards, community events, the kind of steady outreach that doesn’t look dramatic but is meant to get attention where it counts.
A bill to require that every child be tested failed in the Nebraska Legislature in 2011, and since then there have been no efforts to revive it.
For nearby states, the contrast is stark.
Faced with similar concerns, 13 states, including New Jersey, Louisiana and neighboring Iowa, have passed laws requiring universal lead screening—meaning all kids get a blood test before entering kindergarten.
The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend testing in areas with high prevalence of lead or older housing, and Misryoum newsroom reported that a lack of consistent testing nationally leads health officials to miss about half the kids with high levels.
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She points to the scale of risk still embedded in daily life: much of east Omaha’s housing was built before lead paint was banned, and many residents’ drinking water travels through lead pipes.
Peg Schneider, a physician assistant who has been testing Omaha kids for lead since 1989, calls the current situation “abysmally low” and believes every kid should be tested.
When she talks about the testing itself, it’s the kind of routine moment that feels small until you remember what it’s measuring.
One clinic day, there was a bright, clinical smell of alcohol swabs before a finger prick—simple steps, but they can decide whether a family gets treated early.
Supporters of universal screening also argue that it affects federal cleanup decisions.
Kellen Ashford, an EPA spokesperson, said the EPA reassesses the site and that local blood lead data can inform decisions like lowering cleanup thresholds.
But Jim Woolford, who led the EPA’s Superfund program from 2006 to 2020, worries that if kids with lead poisoning aren’t being tested and the community’s levels appear low, EPA officials may decide not to remediate tens of thousands of properties in Omaha.
Instead of “real progress,” he said there’s a risk of officials “declar[ing] victory” and “move[ing] on.”
The stakes are high because lead can be hard to track after the fact.
Misryoum editorial desk noted that lead only stays in the blood for about 30 days, meaning an exposure can be missed even though it can continue to cause damage.
Testing timing matters too—winter results can differ from summer when kids are outside more.
Still, Woolford argued the agency needs an indicator of what’s happened over time, even if imperfect.
Omaha’s own numbers show improvement inside the Superfund site: the percentage of kids there whose tests showed high lead levels has decreased from 33% in 2000 to 2.4% in 2025. But east Omaha still has a higher rate of children with elevated blood lead levels than the national average.
Daniels says as Jovanni gets older, her fear has eased. He rides his bike, wrestles, plays soccer—Ferraris and Dodge Challengers in the mix. But she wonders how many other parents have children like him but never know why.
“I think that needs to be standard across the board — all kids getting tested,” she said, and then she stopped, like she’d been answering the question for years.
In Omaha, whether the next step is an ordinance, a state law revival, or a federal cleanup adjustment will depend on what’s found—and what’s missed when children aren’t tested.
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