UPPER MICHIGAN. (WLUC) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has selected Michigan as one of six state biomonitoring programs that will receive a total of $5 million annually from September 2024 through 2027.

These awards are part of CDC’s ongoing efforts to use biomonitoring to identify communities at risk of potentially harmful environmental exposures. Biomonitoring is the direct measurement of environmental chemicals in people’s blood, serum, and urine. It provides critical data on the amount of chemicals entering the human body from a variety of environmental sources.

According to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), this CDC funding supports the Michigan Chemical Exposure Monitoring (MiChEM) program, which measures more than 190 chemicals in a representative sample of Michigan adults across the state, with a focus on people living in areas with potential increased risk of chemical exposure. It also supports a new project that will measure metals and PFAS among pregnant adults in areas with increased risk of chemical exposure.

An MDHHS spokesperson said the MiChEM program has already completed one round of data collection (2022-2024) with support from a previous CDC grant. In this first round of data collection, three areas in the Upper Peninsula were randomly selected to contribute to a representative sample of the state and participate in data collection. Additional communities will be randomly selected to represent the state in the next round of data collection, which may include communities in the Upper Peninsula.

The MiChEM results will help identify subpopulations with elevated levels, track trends in chemical concentrations over time, and help identify ways to reduce exposure among Michigan residents. The results will be important to all Michiganders, including those living in the UP.

MDHHS also reported that although unrelated to the CDC Biomonitoring Grant, the state department and local health departments (LHDs) are responding to PFAS hotspots throughout Michigan, including the Upper Peninsula. They are working with other state departments as part of the Michigan PFAS Action Response Team (MPART). As part of these responses, MDHHS and LHDs are conducting residential well sampling to determine PFAS levels and identify public health recommendations needed to reduce the risk of exposure.

There is a publicly available interactive map on the MPART website that shows the location of these facilities: MPART: PFAS Geographic Information System.

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