This week in the online edition of a British medical journal, the Lancet, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Baghdad's al-Mustansiriya University estimate that 655,000 more Iraqis died of various causes since the U.S. invasion in March 2003 than would have died in a comparable period were there not a war.
The demographers attributed 601,000 or so of the 655,000 deaths to acts of violence.
This means 15,000 violent deaths a month, 500 violent deaths everyday -- at that sustained level -- for more than three years between March 2003 and June 2006.
Compare this conclusion with a recent U.N. figure, 3,009 Iraqis killed in violence across the country in August, compiled from records of hospitals and morgues countrywide. The U.N. figures conclude a daily rate of about 100 deaths.
The U.N. numbers come from records of deaths; the Hopkins numbers comes from calculations derived from a random sample of 1,849 households in 47 neighborhood clusters across Iraq. In each household, the Iraqi surveyors who did the work asked how many people living in the household were born, died or moved in and out. The surveyors then attempted to verify the reporting through a death certificate (successful, the study author's say, in 90 percent of the cases), and they recorded the cause. The data were then projected onto the population of the entire country, about 26 million people.
The conclusion, based on this sample, is that 91.8 of the deaths were caused by violence. That's the 601,027 number.
Most of these deaths (59 percent), moreover, were reported to have occurred among young men between the ages of 15 and 44, a segment of fighting population that suggests validity.
Gunshots were the most common cause of death, the surveyors found (56 percent). Add in "airstrikes," car bombs, etc., and the number goes even higher.
But back to that U.N. number, 100 deaths a day in August. The Hopkins study suggests that the number of deaths not just this August, but every month since March 2003, is five times larger. Given that the level of violence we are witnessing today is at or near its peak, and given that for periods of time between May 2003 and April 2004, the violence had not yet gotten out of control, in order to get to the Hopkins numbers, one would have to see even significantly higher numbers in recent months than 500 daily deaths to "average" out to 500 deaths overall.
Is it possible that the U.N. is not seeing four out of every five Iraqis who is dying, even today?
It is possible. But it is not likely.
There are two numbers that need to be considered in coming to a conclusion about the Hopkins' study: The raw number of deaths, and the comparison to pre-war deaths, that is, what would have been expected were there not an invasion in 2003.
In the ways of sampling sizes, standard errors, reliability and validity, the John Hopkins team claims being 95 percent certain that their 600,000 number is right. The true number -- the margin of error -- ranges from 400,000 to 900,000 deaths overall.
"To put these numbers in context," one of the study's authors says, "deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003."
The Hopkins team calculated Iraq's mortality rate in the year before the invasion at 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people, comparing it with their post-invasion average of 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people a year. The difference between these two rates is the rate of "excess deaths;" the deaths occurring from violence is how they get to the 600,000 number.
The entire "context" then, hinges on the validity of the pre-war mortality rate. If you accept this number, then I'm told you accept that pre-war Iraq had a better mortality rate than any other country in the Middle East, even Israel.
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Originally Posted by thumbelina
Re: Lancet Survey
Bookmarks