PECHID – PFAS Exposure and Children Development: Evidence from an Italian Environmental Incident

The project
Collegio Carlo Alberto is the host for the project "PFAS Exposure and Children Development: Evidence from an Italian Environmental Incident" (PECHID), awarded the Seal of Excellence (SoE) by the European Commission for a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. The project is funded by Compagnia di San Paolo with Trapezio grant, awarded to a selection of excellent Horizon projects.

Motivation
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are highly stable carbon fluorine compounds used since the fifties, among other things, to make products heat and water resistant. These substances, informally known as “forever chemicals,” persist in the environment and can accumulate in the body. The American CDC, in its fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, concluded that “PFAS are found in the blood of people and animals all over the world”. While many recent studies showed robust associations between PFAS exposure and adverse health effects, including among children and newborns, there is currently no evidence proving a causal link. The main aim of the project is to fill this gap by providing the first credible causal evidence on the relationship between PFAS exposure, children's cognitive development and health.

Setup
Waste disposed by a large PFAS producer located in Veneto, Italy, resulted in an extensive contaminant plume (shaded in yellow in the picture). The plume eventually contaminated Europe's second largest aquifer, used by a water supplier to feed the population of roughly thirty municipalities. The environmental incident was discovered only in the summer of 2013, when local authorities intervened and potential PFAS exposure ended. Roughly 140,000 were exposed to PFAS for two decades, making this the leading European case of PFAS contamination.

Main goals
The project exploits the quasi-experimental setup provided by the localized nature of the incident and the dynamics related to its discovery to identify how PFAS exposure affected children's cognitive development and health in contaminated municipalities.

Execution
The first stage of the project involved researching documentation, contacting relevant stakeholders, securing access to restricted data and developing proficiency with GIS techniques. The second and longest stage involved collection and manipulation of all data necessary for the analysis. The main paper in the project, related to the effects of PFAS contamination on cognitive development, is based on INVALSI education data, administrative school data on enrollment and  certified disability (provided by the Ministry of Education), real estate data (provided by Agenzia delle Entrate), ISTAT demographic, census and water resources data, digital cartography (by ISTAT, ARPAV and Azienda Zero del Veneto), ARPAV environmental contamination data, INEMAR pollution data, and Multiscopo survey data accessed at Laboratorio Adele. The third stage consisted in empirical analysis, paper preparation, presentation and submission. Effects of interest are identified exploiting econometric methods from the causal micro-econometric toolbox, in particular the geographic quasi-experiment and difference-in-differences techniques.

Project continuation
The foundations of the PECHID project, including institutional work, data preparation, construction and validation of a “tailored” identification strategy, support the broader Veneto PFAS Project, which extends and incorporates the original PECHID project. All project updates can thus be found at:

https://sites.google.com/site/lucafacchinello/vpp-project

Research team
Luca Facchinello - PI
Claudia Villosio - Research Manager