SOUTH BEND — A cluster of neighborhoods on the near northwest side had some of the highest rates of lead-poisoned children in the state from 2005 through 2015. But local health officials haven’t studied how much progress has been made to correct the problem in those areas.
Detailed information on lead-poisoned children here is available, but the St. Joseph County Health Department hasn’t crunched the numbers. Six months ago, the University of Notre Dame asked for the data and volunteered to analyze it.
But Dr. Luis Galup, the department’s health officer, said it would take too much time to compile it for Notre Dame.
“Someone would have to sit down, open each individual case and type it into a spreadsheet,” he said. “I don’t have a person available to do that.”
And because of federal privacy rules, Galup said, the information can’t be viewed by Notre Dame until it is “de-identified” so that personal information is excluded.
Galup said he recently asked the Indiana State Health Department to create the spreadsheet for Notre Dame. But he was told the state also doesn’t have the manpower to do it.
The lack of information has been frustrating for Heidi Beidinger-Burnett, a faculty member at Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health and member of the county Board of Health, which oversees the health department.
She thinks there could be an easy solution.