Health and Economic Effects of Piped Water

Evan Peet, Duke University

Human activities continuously modify the environmental on a variety of scales and the resulting changes can act as stressors with multiple effects on ecology and human health. The goal of this paper is to improve the understanding of the costs to human health of environmental contamination by profiling the quality of two environmental inputs - air and water - and relating these to long-term health outcomes in a developing country context. The quality of environmental inputs is assessed using various exogenous yet noisy measures to determine the underlying latent quality of water and air. Short and long term ndividual health data comes from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey. Survey data is combined with additional environmental data from various sources in order to characterize the environment of the survey cohort during their early formative years of life.