Iranian Journal of

Background and Objective: Regular use of household cleaning products and cosmetics can result in adverse consequences for human health. Therefore, the knowledge of consumption pattern of these products can help to evaluate the effects and finally control the consequences of their inappropriate application. As there is not an appropriate tool for evaluating public use-pattern for these products in Iran, we studied the reliability and validity of a questionnaire designed for the use-patterns of these products.
Materials and Methods: In the present study, a questionnaire, which was previously applied in similar studies for this purpose, was first translated to Persian. Then, some changes were made in the questionnaire according to the studied population. In the next step, the assessment of both content validity and face validity of the instrument was performed. Finally, the questionnaire reliability was studied in two test-retest steps at a 14-day interval with 40 subjects older than 14 years old being resident in Tehran city.
Results: Total Content Validity Index (CVI) of this questionnaire ranged 0.66-1 for all question items. Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.814. The correlation assessment of each question item based on the total correlation score showed that all questionnaire items had a direct and strong correlation with the total instrument score.
Conclusion: Given the acceptable validity and reliability obtained for the questionnaire in Persian in this study, it can be used in those investigations that evaluate use patterns or asses the exposure risks to chemical pollutants from cosmetic products or detergents.

Background and Objective: In this study, we aimed to assess Iran’s position and trends for environmental health status among the countries of “Iran’s perspective document in 1404” according to the indicators used in Environmental Performance Index (EPI) report in 2018.
Materials and Methods: The score of indicators in environmental health area; air quality (including household solid fuels, exposure to PM_2.5, and PM_2.5 exceedance), water and sanitation (including drinking water and sanitation) and heavy metals (including lead) were extracted for all studied countries as well as for the last and baseline (generally ten years prior to last report) years from EPI 2018 database. According to EPI scores, the performance of the studied countries in each indicator was ranked. The percent change in the score of each indicator from baseline to current year was calculated and compared with the mean percent change for all studied countries.
Results: Iran ranked 7^th regarding air quality in 2016. Also, it ranked 6^th, 8^th, and 9^th in terms of household solid fuels, exposure to PM_2.5, and PM_2.5 exceedance, respectively. The EPI score for Iran regarding water and sanitation was 54.4 in 2005 and 58.74 in 2016 (percent change=7.98%). Iran ranked 21^st in 2005 regarding lead exposure index. Although this index showed a growth of 100% in 2016, which is very desirable compared to the average growth of all countries (34.47%), but only leads to one step up in the ranking of Iran and was ranked 20^th in comparison with other countries.
Conclusion: Totally, according to EPI 2018, Iran ranked 6^th in the field of environmental health issues among 23 countries of “Iran’s perspective document in 1404”. However, there is uncertainty in the accuracy of the EPI raw data used for calculating index scores. Hence, caution should be exercised in their interpretation.