The Impacts of Superfund Site Cleanup on Infant Health

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: The United States is home to over a thousand “Superfund" sites, toxic waste dumps that pose significant threats to both human and environmental health through the contamination of air, water, and soil. Previous studies have established a statistically significant link between the presence of environmental toxicants and negative birth outcomes. However, there have been no comprehensive nationwide analyses of the impacts of Superfund cleanups on the prevalence of birth outcomes in surrounding areas. In this paper, I match the pollutants present at Superfund sites that were cleaned up between 1983 and 2004, with the observed frequency of congenital abnormalities in the same counties as the cleanups. I then analyze whether Superfund cleanups have a noticeable impact on the occurrence of congenital abnormalities, and whether we can link the removal of specific pollutants to a decrease in the prevalence of specific classes of abnormalities. I find that, at the county level, we do not find uniformly unidirectional results; that is, the data does not affirm that cleanup of a Superfund site necessarily results in a decrease in negative birth outcomes for infants across the same county. These results suggest that the positive benefits of Superfund cleanups on human health at the county level may not be as widespread as may be believed.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 3, 2019

Author	Ganesan, Maya
Primary advisor	Bhattacharya, Jay

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/vq081jw7563

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Ganesan, Maya. (2019). The Impacts of Superfund Site Cleanup on Infant Health. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/vq081jw7563

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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