On Monday I reported that public health experts are worried that the report is likely to confuse people.

The message seems at odds with the repeated state health advisories warning against contact with the soil of the Tittabawassee floodplain and against eating fish from the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and Saginaw Bay.

In a Feb. 1 letter to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Director Lisa Jackson representatives from the Lone Tree Council, League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club and others wrote:

We believe the mailing by the University of Michigan was inappropriate and premature, inasmuch as it is clearly intended to influence public opinion before the new study has been published in a peer-reviewed journal and made available for public scrutiny. It also sends conflicting signals to the population, and interferes with and frustrates public health efforts to educate the public about legitimate health threats.

The groups urged EPA to conduct a review of the report and inform residents about its limitations.

EPA has not yet stated whether it plans to respond to the latest UMDES report.

In 2009 the agency conducted a formal review of the University of Michigan Dioxin Study and announced that it would be of limited value from a public health perspective because it failed to address dioxin exposure among children and did not adequately sample people who live on highly contaminated land or eat local fish.

This year’s event features a Special Olympics hot dog cook-out, a teen dance and battle of the bands, a rummage sale and beer tent. But the centerpiece of the festival is the walleye tournament — a competition to see who can catch the largest fish from the river.

Doyle said that the people fishing for walleye are aware of the state fish advisories. “The fishermen all know about the advisories ’cause they are posted when you buy a permit,” he said.

“We don’t serve any walleye caught in river,” he said, adding that the fish served during the Friday evening fish fry is “probably pollock.” Doyle estimates that 80 percent of the Walleye Fest competitors will keep and use the fish they catch.

“Other people donate them to food banks,” he said. “If people don’t want the fish we will filet the fish and donate them to different food organizations that want them.”

Dioxin remediation work three miles downstream from Freeland in Saginaw Township’s West Michigan Park will not impact the river-wide festival, Doyle said.

In 2001, the National Institute of Health listed the family of chemicals known as dioxins as “known human carcinogens” — and while the jury is still out on the chemicals’ level of toxicity, a 2003 Environmental Protection Agency report said dioxin is a “dangerous carcinogen.”

You can read Eartha Jane’s full story here.

Just to show you how bad the crisis in vacant and foreclosed has become, Habitat for Humanity is still around, and still helping out — only now the group is concentrating, in some places, on tearing houses down, The New York Times reports. The organization is already hard at work at this effort in Saginaw, Mich., a city plagued by abandoned properties.

As part of an agreement with the city, and with at least $500,000 from the state and federal governments, the Habitat for Humanity volunteers and paid workers plan to demolish two vacant, dilapidated houses here a week, every week, over the next two years. As for creating homes, they will build or refurbish eight houses this year.

The shift in the organization’s focus is a sign of the times in Saginaw, a shrinking city northwest of Detroit where at least 800 houses sit empty and doomed, and offers a glimpse of what increasingly empty neighborhoods in many cities may soon face as foreclosures continue.

International leaders of Habitat for Humanity, an organization more than three decades old, say their focus is changing to meet the demands of a changing economy. In cities where so many homes sit empty, the group is leaning away from building new houses and instead fixing up old ones, said Ken Klein, the vice chairman of the group’s board.

At least Habitat is out there, doing something about this. There’s much more Congress and the Obama administration could do to help out as well. It’s not an impossible task. In April, New Jersey will begin, for the first time, requiring a bank or other entity that forecloses on a house to take responsibility for it both before and after it becomes a bank-owned property, or REO.

Lawmakers could easily require banks receiving bailout funds to take care of their neglected REOs, as a condition of getting the money. Public shame, which worked in convincing some AIG executives to give back some of those bonuses, might also work here. Pass around a few photographs of trashed houses owned by Citigroup, Wells Fargo, etc., and it could go a long way in prompting some action.

The government could also get behind cities that are trying to stop banks from dumping their dilapidated REOs on the real estate market at fire-sale prices, claiming the practice has become a public nuisance because it causes a death spiral of falling property values. Washington, in addition, could support the idea of a federal land bank, or  land banking efforts in general,  so communities could more easily acquire and reuse large inventories of vacant homes. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s new policy of not automatically evicting renters from foreclosed homes was a huge step in the right direction – but there have been few other innovative rental ideas coming from the government.

The worrisome question is not so much what Washington eventually will do — it is when will it finally get around to doing it? How many cities will be left scarred by vacant and abandoned homes before someone acts?