At link you'll see the words "a study", which I've put in bold in the first paragraph, click there and read the 25 page report.
US, Britain reject study that claims Iraqi death toll tops 600,000
But some experts support results, which were extrapolated from interviews with Iraqi families.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, in cooperation with Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have released
a study that says more than 655,000 Iraqis have died in Iraq following the US-led invasion of that country.
The Guardian reports that authors of the study say that nearly 31 percent of the deaths were caused by coalition troops, while most of the remaining fatalities were caused by violence such as gunshot wounds (56 percent) and car bombs.
"Although such death rates might be common in times of war," write the authors, Professor Gilbert Burnham and colleagues, "the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century and should be of grave concern to everyone.
"At the conclusion of our 2004 study we urged that an independent body assess the excess mortality that we saw in Iraq. This has not happened.
"We continue to believe that an independent international body to monitor compliance with the Geneva conventions and other humanitarian standards in conflict is urgently needed. With reliable data, those voices that speak out for civilians trapped in conflict might be able to lessen the tragic human cost of future wars."
British medical journal The Lancet, which published the new study online, published a similar study in 2004 that also created a controversy over the number of Iraqis killed. But the Guardian reports that for the new study, the authors of the piece had it reviewed by four independent experts, who all urged the research be published. One of the reviewing experts noted the "powerful strength" of the research methods, "which involved house-to-house surveys by teams of doctors across Iraq."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1012/dailyUpdate.htmlThe researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 percent certain that the real number lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths. Even the smaller figure is almost eight times the estimate some others have derived.The latest study in the Lancet about Iraqi deaths is staggering: they calculate that 655,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003, about 500 per day since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Critics will quibble about the methodology used in the study. The authors themselves say that the range of deaths runs from 426,369 to 793,663. I'm willing to take the low-end. So more than 426,000 Iraqis have been killed by George W. Bush's war.
I can't resist pointing out that even Saddam Hussein's worst detractors estimate that 300,000 Iraqis died during his reign. I happen to believe that that number is wildly inflated, and certainly it isn't based on any sort of research. It's just a number promoted (before the invasion in 2003) to demonize Saddam. But even if it's true, George Bush has surpassed in three bloody years what took Saddam three decades in power to accumulate.
P.S. Here's a link to the .pdf version of the original Lancet story. It's technical, but read it.
http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/10/655000.htmlAnd here's another bit to read:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15267.htmhttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15275.htmNoone has discredited the initial Lancet report, not even disputed by any academic journal or study that I've seen, I've seen quite a few. This particular methodology is even more thorough and more comprehensive.
And let us remember that Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health is by far the leading and most prestigious public health research school in the world. And The Lancet is one of the top 3 peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. Both Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and The Lancet require very rigorous and statistically sound methods before allowing publication.
The mortality survey used well-established and scientifically proven methods for measuring mortality and disease in populations. These same survey methods were used to measure mortality during conflicts in the Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and other regions. For the Iraq study, data were collected from 47 randomly selected clusters of 40 households each. At each household selected, trained Iraqi surveyors collected data on the number of births and deaths that occurred in the household between January 1, 2002, and June 30, 2006. To be considered a household member, the deceased had to have lived in the home at least three months prior to death. When interviewers asked to see a death certificate at households reporting a death, it was presented in 92 percent of instances. The survey recorded 1,474 births and 629 deaths among 12,801 people surveyed. The data were then applied to the 26.1 million Iraqis living in the survey area.