Project Overview
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted important social disparities contributing to disproportionate disease burden. In New York City (NYC), the Latinx population has close to twice the COVID-19 death rate compared to the white population and disproportionately experiences crowded housing, inadequate access to health care, and employment in precarious jobs without the option of working from home. Our parent project is studying environmental health disparities in one such population, Latinx domestic cleaners. “Safe and Just Cleaners: Reducing Exposure to Toxic Cleaning Chemical Products Among Low Wage Immigrant Latino Community Members” (R01ES027890) is a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project with the goal of quantifying exposures to chemical compounds in household cleaning and disinfecting products and developing guidelines, approaches and campaign materials to reduce hazardous exposures.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our project’s evolving education campaign, consistent with the work of other environmental groups, discouraged routine use of potentially hazardous disinfecting products, since under common conditions, disinfection of residential surfaces was not routinely indicated. Current guidance on effective cleaning and disinfecting for SARS-CoV-2 however, complicates these recommendations. Poison control centers have reported increases in poisonings due to cleaning and disinfecting products.
We hypothesize that the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to enduring changes in residential cleaning practices including the increased use of potentially harmful cleaning and disinfecting products. Our study population especially needs guidance, in addition to the public in general, on how to both clean and disinfect to effectively eliminate SARS-CoV-2 without jeopardizing their health.
Principal Investigator(s)
Research Aims
To address this gap and to better understand and respond to the specific issues and needs affecting our study population during COVID-19, we will conduct these supplemental research activities within the scope of our current project to address the following research questions:
- How have immigrant Latinx domestic cleaners in NYC, a vulnerable population characterized by a low social safety net and increased risk for environmental exposures in their home and work environment, experienced the COVID-19 pandemic?
Aim 1: Assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and well-being, employment status, and knowledge, attitudes and cleaning and disinfecting practices among Latinx domestic cleaners in the NYC metropolitan area using a longitudinal survey design drawing on our pre-COVID-19 survey data
A. Develop, pilot and systematically collect and analyze data using a telephone survey to assess post COVID-19 changes in socioeconomic, health and environmental exposure status in our study population
B. Offer survey participants COVID-19 antibody testing using the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai assay to understand the prevalence of past infection in this vulnerable population
- How have knowledge, attitudes and practices around domestic cleaning and disinfecting changed since COVID- 19 and what are the major concerns and knowledge gaps of domestic cleaners and their clients?
- What modes of communication about safer cleaning and disinfecting practices, in the context of COVID-19, are likely to be effective at reaching our Latinx immigrant domestic cleaner population and their communities?
Aim 2: Develop educational and other materials for a COVID-19 Domestic Cleaner Safe Return to Work Toolkit for domestic cleaners and clients based on our post-COVID survey and other relevant evidence-based findings
A. Assess educational needs through post-COVID-19 survey findings and input from domestic cleaners, clients’ groups, and other project partners to determine post COVID-19 educational priorities and develop a bilingual English/Spanish COVID-19 Domestic Cleaner Safe Return to Work Toolkit</p>
B. Develop and evaluate a social media dissemination plan for the toolkit as part of our project’s Safe and Just Cleaners campaign
Project Impact
As domestic cleaners return to work they will face additional environmental exposures including likely increased use of disinfecting agents. This research will enhance our project’s ability to generate relevant educational materials and other campaign-related information tailored to cleaners’ and their communities’ needs to understand COVID-19 and to promote better health and well-being and safer cleaning and disinfecting in the post COVID-19 context.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “List N” provides commercial names of disinfecting products for use against SARS-CoV-2, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention links this list in its guidance documents for home cleaning. However, none of the 420 List N products are also included on EPA’s Safer Choice List of products that are safer for human health and the environment. Existing research has found that domestic cleaning and disinfecting products are associated with chronic respiratory illness.