Is Environmental Health a Basic Human Right?

Background: There is paucity of measures to conduct epidemiological studies related to disasters in Sri Lanka. This study validates a Sinhalese translation of the Impact of Event Scale8 items version (IES-8) for use in Sri Lanka. Methods: This cross-sectional validation study was conducted in the densely populated rural area of Tangalle in the Southern province of Sri Lanka. The English version of the IES-8 after translation procedures in to Sinhalese was administered by trained raters to a community sample of 30 survivors of tsunami aged 13 years and above. Diagnostic accuracy, reproducibility and validity of the translated IES was assessed in terms of sensitivity, specificity, predictive values, likelihood ratios, diagnostic odds ratio, inter-rater reliability, internal consistency, criterion validity and construct validity. Results: The cut-off score of 15 gave a fair sensitivity (77%) for screening along with other components of diagnostic accuracy. The inter-rater reliability was high (0.89). The internal consistency for the whole scale was high (0.78) with a high face and content validity. The criterion validity was high (0.83) and the construct validity demonstrated the two factor structure documented in the literature. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that this Sinhalese version of the Impact of Event Scale has sound diagnostic accuracy as well as psychometric properties and makes it an ideal measure for epidemiological studies related to natural and man made disasters in Sri Lanka. Introduction Epidemiological studies exploring psychiatric disorders like Post-Traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD) needs culturally validated measures. Natural and man-made disasters result in stress related disorders among the surviving populations and Sri Lanka in the past had suffered from both kinds of disasters. Post-Traumatic Stress disorder is a well documented outcome of such disasters and although 31,000 people lost their lives in the tsunami that affected Sri Lanka [1] the prevalence of PTSD has not been studied as its aftermath. However, among the survivors of war PTSD had been decribed in 27–72% of the population affected by landmines [2,3] depending on the measure used to define PTSD in these studies. The measures used in these studies have not validated to the Sri Lankan culture and language. Published: 16 February 2007 Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health 2007, 3:4 doi:10.1186/1745-0179-34 Received: 24 September 2006 Accepted: 16 February 2007 This article is available from: http://www.cpementalhealth.com/content/3/1/4 © 2007 John and Russell; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.