The Horapest project aims to study the impact of residential exposure to pesticides on health outcomes in France.

By jointly exploiting the valuable and sensitive data from the French National Health Data System (SNDS) and the new data available from the French National Institute for Industrial Environment and Risks (INERIS), reporting pesticide exposure at an unprecedented level of temporal and spatial precision in 2018-2019.

Data on pesticide exposure will be compared with details of maternal and child health care, with the aim of assessing and quantifying the body of knowledge on children's cognitive and physical development and their alteration due to pesticide exposure during pregnancy. The impact of the study therefore concerns the assessment of a critical risk at the crossroads of epidemiological, political and economic priorities: the impact of pesticides in residential areas. The methodological challenge is to establish a causal model that takes account of the spatio-temporal nature of the phenomenon under consideration, and of the (many) unobserved confounding factors.

Project duration: 3 years (2021-2024)

Contacts : 

INRAE, ALISS laboratory, UR 1303
Olivier Allais | Carine Nivet

Paris-Saclay University, LISN laboratory, CNRS UMR 9015, INRIA (TAU team)
Michèle Sebag | Monique Granon