Since the pandemic, households everywhere have been more concerned with cleaning and disinfecting. By some estimates, sales of the popular bleach brand Clorox increased by as much as 15 percent. But the Covid-19 outbreak is not why Alisal High School 10th-grader Karen Perez-Guido decided to participate in LUCIR, short for Lifting Up Communities by Intervening with Research.
Perez-Guido is part of the CHAMACOS Youth Council, a youth advocacy and research offshoot of the CHAMACOS study – short for Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas – led by Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health (CERCH) at UC Berkeley. That study launched in 1999 and is the longest-running study of pesticides and other environmental exposures among children and pregnant women in farmworker communities.
Like CHAMACOS, LUCIR set out to measure the risks of chemical exposure to human health, but instead of looking at pesticides, participants like Perez-Guido are looking at everyday household cleaning products. The study was conducted in the summer of 2019, but the results have yet to be published. Perez-Guido says the data was enough to want to change how her household did their chores.
“I didn’t want to get them sick,” she says, referring to her immediate and extended family; she has young cousins and she lives with two toddlers. “Once we switched out our regular products with ‘green products,’ we noticed we’d get fewer headaches or we wouldn’t feel dizzy after using them.”
“We noticed we wouldn’t feel dizzy.”
Though LUCIR hasn’t named names yet, they report the products they measured and analyzed run the gamut of the most popular brands of all-purpose sprays, window cleaners and disinfectants. They did the same for “green” alternatives too. In both cases, they instructed women to use a special air pump backpack to estimate the chemical exposure that they may be inhaling doing everyday work.
“It was really interesting to see the difference,” Perez-Guido says. “Some of these products my family has been using for their entire lives, and I’ve been exposed growing up.”
James Nolan, the community science manager at CERCH works with LUCIR and notes that this study is intended to measure long-term effects of exposure to people, especially women in predominantly Latino communities like Salinas. It is estimated that women doing the bulk of cleaning up and statewide, 80 percent of professional cleaners are women. “That number is represented here but also in the state," Nolan says.
He emphasizes the focus was on chemicals associated with increased risk of cancer in ordinary, everyday products. “It’s not that we’re just measuring the risk of mixing bleach or ammonia – which is very dangerous – but asking if a little bit of exposure, over a long period of time, is harmful,” he says.
The good news is LUCIR suggests alternative products too. “They can be found at places like Walmart, Safeway or Target,” Nolan says.
As for efficacy, Perez-Guido reports her family has been happy with their decision to switch to alternative products, like all-purpose cleaners from Seventh Generation: “We found that the alternatives have worked as well if not better than what we were using before.”