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Originally Posted by savoir-faire  So is their anyone who believes they know of any study that was closer in estimating deaths above normal in Iraq in the time period studied? If so please show me the study and we can compare and contrast your count against the MIT/Johns Hopkins school of public health method. |
A new WHO study puts the number of deaths at 151,000. The study was published by
The Chronicle of Higher Education. Their lead-in states: "
A new survey estimates that 151,000 violent deaths took place in Iraq between March 2003 and June 2006. The finding increases the controversy surrounding an earlier study that came up with a much higher death count for the years following the American-led invasion."
Unfortunately, the article is accessible only by subscription.
NPR described the article this way:
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A study conducted by the World Health Organization and the Iraq Health Ministry estimates that more than 150,000 Iraqis suffered violent deaths in the first three years after the U.S. invasion.
That's about a fourth of the number of deaths found in an earlier controversial study.
The World Health Organization's study of violent deaths is based on visits to more than 10,000 households throughout Iraq. Ties Boerma, WHO's director of Measurements and Health Information, says the results include the deaths of civilians and soldiers who were part of those households.
"They don't include car accidents and they don't include unintentional injuries," says Boerma. "They just include intentional injuries and armed conflict. In fact, the armed conflict deaths are more than 80 percent of the deaths we got reported."
Researchers left it up to the respondents to define the cause of death.
"If they said someone died while trying to avoid a bomb blast, (you) could define it as an armed conflict death, but that was up to the respondents," says Boerma.
Boerma and his team looked at the period between March 2003 and June 2006, and estimated 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq.
That's a fraction of the more than 600,000 violent deaths reported for the same period by researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2006, a survey that continues to be debated in the press and political circles.
Both studies counted civilian and combatant fatalities. Boerma thinks the difference in their findings is that the earlier Hopkins study visited far fewer neighborhoods and villages. Researchers working with Hopkins visited 47 so-called clusters; researchers with WHO visited more than 1,000 clusters.
"Because we are talking about a survey that is much larger, we have a little bit more confidence in that method than in a very small cluster survey," says Boerma.
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Re: the Lancet survey: Right wing claims that the Lancet survey should be discredited just because it was partially funded by George Soros's Open Society Institute are just partisanship at work. It seems to me that OSI does considerable laudable non-partisan work. But the influence of one of the three authors, a critic of the war, declaring that he "wanted to get the survey out before the election, if at all possible" is quite telling, IMO.
Moreover, while survey sampling and the drawing of inferences for a population therefrom is a well-known and accepted technique, any study without well documented methodology and data is highly suspect if not entirely worthless. Peer review is a very necessary tool to keep people honest. When it cannot be done thoroughly because of an author(s) refusing to release key information, an assumption of dishonesty is not unwarranted. At the very least, a questioning of motives and purpose are appropriate.
Though he was making reference to reports of alien visitations, the late astronomer Carl Sagan's popular saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," seems to apply to the Lancet study as well. But that evidence was not made available, contrary to ordinary, much less
extraordinary, practice.