The team had been engaged in the CHAMACOS study (R01ES026994, PI-Eskenazi), a longitudinal cohort study of more than 600 Latino primarily farmworker families (N=600 mother-child dyads, N=1200) in the agricultural Salinas Valley, California, for over 20 years. The overarching aim of this study had been to investigate the health sequelae of pesticide exposure over the life course, from in utero to adulthood. In this project, the aim was to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these families.
Low-income families, and particularly farmworker families, were likely to have been disproportionately infected by COVID-19 due to cramped living quarters, their “essential” work status, traveling to work in crowded farmworker buses, and close working conditions on packing lines. In addition, substantial epidemiologic and toxicologic evidence suggested that pesticides, including organophosphates (OPs), organochlorines (OCs), carbamates, pyrethroids, the herbicide glyphosate, and ethylenebisdithiocarbamate (EBDC) fungicides, could impact immunologic suppression and increase susceptibility to infectious diseases and more severe disease. For these reasons, it was estimated that between 20%-40% of the CHAMACOS cohort would have been infected by January 2021.
Furthermore, it was hypothesized that the CHAMACOS cohort would have been more impacted by the pandemic due to poverty, insecure employment, risk for food scarcity, immigration status, and poor access to health services. For the 600 mother-child dyads, key information had been collected prior to the pandemic on health, financial and food security, and other relevant variables that may have been altered by the pandemic or increased the risk of infection.