Prepared for North Central District Health Department
A lead screen rural Nebraska families can run themselves.
NCDHD covers nine counties across north-central Nebraska. Fluoro-Spec is a low-cost field test that lets families check their own homes for lead paint, so you can reach the whole district without driving an inspector to every door.
The housing in your district is old, and old housing is where lead paint lives.
Lead paint was banned in 1978. The older a home is, the more likely it has it, and the more lead that paint contains. Across your nine counties, nearly three in four homes predate the ban, and more than a third were built before 1950, when paint carried the most lead.
9
counties served by NCDHD
22,904
total homes in the district
16,743
built before 1980 (73%), the lead-paint era
8,309
built before 1950 (36%), the highest-lead tier
| County | Homes | Pre-1980 | % Pre-1980 | % Pre-1950 | Child poverty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Holt | 4,903 | 3,459 | 70% | 29% | 10% |
| Knox | 4,532 | 3,195 | 70% | 35% | 12% |
| Antelope | 3,142 | 2,457 | 78% | 41% | 13% |
| Pierce | 3,141 | 2,302 | 73% | 42% | 9% |
| Cherry | 2,998 | 2,046 | 68% | 30% | 14% |
| Brown | 1,656 | 1,358 | 82% | 41% | 6% |
| Boyd | 1,210 | 976 | 81% | 48% | 24% |
| Rock | 829 | 635 | 77% | 31% | 14% |
| Keya Paha | 493 | 315 | 64% | 45% | 10% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2022). Housing age from table B25034, poverty from table S1701.
What Fluoro-Spec is.
It is a chemical field screen, not an instrument. A small reagent bottle plus a UV light. You put a drop on a painted surface, a glaze, or dust, and lead lights up bright green under the UV. It reads in seconds on a doorframe, a windowsill, a dish, a painted toy, or old furniture.
No certification and no training are required to use it. A home visitor, a WIC nurse, or a parent at the kitchen table can run it from a one-page instruction. It is a fast presumptive screen, not a blood test and not a substitute for a certified risk assessment. Its job is to find the likely lead first, so any inspector time you have goes to the homes that need it.
This is not a prototype. We have sold over 30,000 of these directly to families, where they retail between $50 and $75.
How it fits what you already run.
The simplest way to deploy it is to fold a kit into programs that already reach your families:
WIC
Hand a kit to families at a WIC visit. Weber-Morgan in Utah did exactly this, 90 kits through WIC, and found multiple lead hazards.
Prenatal
Include it in a prenatal packet so an expecting parent can clear the home before the baby arrives.
First year
Add it to a first-year or home-visit packet for families already in your services.
The point for the family is simple. If they test their home and it comes back clean, that is real reassurance, and no one has had to put a child through anything. If it lights up, now you know that is a home worth a real follow-up.
Where it pays for itself in a lead program.
If you run HUD-funded work or elevated-blood-lead follow-up, the kit earns its cost in three places. It does not replace the lab dust-wipe clearance a risk assessor signs, or the blood draw that diagnoses a child. It makes both of those cost less by spending them where they count.
Clearance
HUD dust-wipe passes. Run it during cleanup, before you pay for lab clearance wipes. If a surface is still releasing lead, you catch it and re-clean it, instead of failing a paid clearance and mobilizing the crew back out. One avoided failure is worth far more than the kit.
EBLL
Elevated blood lead investigations. When a child comes back high, the environmental investigation has to find the source. The kit lets your investigator flag the likely lead-painted surfaces on the spot, so the lab dust-wipes go where they will actually find it.
Interim
Interim control measures. After paint stabilization or friction-surface work, check the treated surfaces before clearance, so you know the work held before you pay to confirm it.
Who already uses it.
Public health programs serving families with elevated blood lead, including:
New Hampshire DHHS Healthy Homes, plus Amoskeag Health in Manchester, in home visits and clinic.
Columbus Public Health, Ohio.
Weber-Morgan Health Dept, Utah, through WIC and environmental health.
South Bend & Elkhart, Indiana HUD lead programs, plus Weld County CO and Utah County.
Pricing.
To start, we send a few kits free so your staff can see what it is before you spend anything. After that, program pricing runs by volume, the more you order, the lower the per-kit cost.
100 kits
$50/kit
$5,000
250 kits
$35/kit
$8,750
500 kits
$25/kit
$12,500
If you tell us what you are funded under (HUD lead hazard, CDC childhood lead, or local), we will size an order to your fiscal year so it fits the grant cleanly. On the regulatory side, Fluoro-Spec is manufactured and sold under an EPA-authorized Low Volume Exemption under TSCA Section 5 (40 CFR 723.50). Full detail on the safety page.
Want a few kits to try?
We will send a sample to NCDHD at no cost, and walk your team through it on a short call.
Email Eric RitterEric Ritter, Fluoro-Spec Inc. · eric@fluorospect.com · 631-461-1838
Housing and poverty figures: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, 2022 (tables B25034 and S1701), for Antelope, Boyd, Brown, Cherry, Holt, Keya Paha, Knox, Pierce, and Rock counties. The 1978 federal ban on lead-based paint in housing is the reference point for the pre-1980 figure; paint manufactured before 1950 generally carried the highest lead content.