http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,,1925748,00.htmlThey say that the truth is the first casualty of war. In the case of Iraq, a bitter war of words has been triggered by the publication of a report in the Lancet last week by a team of academic researchers from Johns Hopkins University. They have estimated that the number of extra fatalities caused by the war is 655,000, or 2.5% of the Iraqi population. Since this is based on a relatively small sample of households (1849 to be precise), the researchers admit that they cannot be sure of the exact number. However, using statistical techniques, they say that they can be 95% confident that the true number lies somewhere between 393,000 and 943,000 extra deaths. A wide range, but even the lower figure is about 10 times higher than the American and British governments believe is credible.
In order to understand the debate about these figures, you have to understand the method used by the Johns Hopkins team. They randomly picked 47 clusters of about 40 households each, all over Iraq, and then sent on-the-ground researchers to knock on the front door of each of the houses chosen. (The mind boggles at how dangerous this task might have been, but thankfully no-one got hurt.) Once they gained access, the team asked how many deaths had occurred in the household since the invasion, along with the causes of death. In 92% of the deaths reported to them, they were able to verify the claim by actually seeing a death certificate. Then they asked how many deaths had occurred in the 15 months before the invasion, which they used as a reference point.
The researchers discovered that the death rate in the period since the invasion has been 13.3 people per 1,000 per year. Before the war, their figures indicate that the mortality rate was only 5.5 per 1,000 per year. Therefore the death rate has risen by 7.8 per 1,000 per year, and if you multiply this by the time elapsed and the size of the entire Iraqi population, you arrive at a figure of 655,000 additional deaths.
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The Johns Hopkins team says that their estimate of a mortality rate of 5.5 in the pre-war period is almost exactly the same as the official estimate made at the time by the CIA. But there are other, much higher estimates, including two estimates of around 9.5 made by United Nations agencies. If these higher estimates of the initial death rate are right, then the number of additional deaths caused by the war would fall to 319,000 - less than half the Johns Hopkins team claimed, but still many times greater than anything admitted by the invading coalition.
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