Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties
The Lancet, one of the oldest scientific medical journals in the world, published two peer-reviewed studies on the effect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation on the Iraqi mortality rate.
The studies estimate the number of excess deaths caused by the occupation, both direct (combatants plus non-combatants) and indirect (due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poor healthcare, etc.).
The authors of the study readily acknowledge this point and note the problems in the paper; for example they state that "there can be a dramatic clustering of deaths in wars where many die from bombings".
[16][17] The results of the study were politically sensitive, since a heavy death toll could raise questions regarding the humanitarian justifications on the eve of a contested US presidential election.
[12] Epidemiologist Klim McPherson writes in the 12 March 2005 British Medical Journal:[21] "The government rejected this survey and its estimates as unreliable; in part absurdly because statistical extrapolation from samples was thought invalid.
These three misattributed clusters were therefore excluded, leaving a final sample of 1849 households in 47 randomly selected clusters.The Lancet authors based their calculations on an overall, post-invasion, excess mortality rate of 7.8/1000/year.
IBC also enumerates several "shocking implications" which would be true if the Lancet report were accurate, e.g. "Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued" and claims that these "extreme and improbable implications" and "utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas" are some of several reasons why they doubt the study's estimates.
"[31] Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels, was quoted in an interview for Nature.com saying that Burnham's team have published "inflated" numbers that "discredit" the process of estimating death counts.
Even in Darfur, where armed groups have wiped out whole villages, she says that researchers have not recorded the 500 predominately [sic] violent deaths per day that the Johns Hopkins team estimates are occurring in Iraq.
[34] Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer known for producing death estimates for the first Gulf War, evaluates the Lancet survey and other sources in a paper for the International Review of the Red Cross.
[38] Iraq's Health Minister Ali al-Shemari gave a similar view in November 2006: "Since three and a half years, since the change of the Saddam regime, some people say we have 600,000 are killed.
I think 150 is OK."[39] A 2010 paper by Professor Michael Spagat entitled "Ethical and Data-Integrity Problems in the Second Lancet Survey of Mortality in Iraq" was published in the peer reviewed journal Defense & Peace Economics.
Debora MacKenzie, writing in New Scientist, said "There is no direct evidence that the latest attack on Burnham is politically motivated," but the APPOR's stated purpose, "to ensure survey-based research meets high standards," has itself "been questioned by experts."
The authors David W. Moore and George F. Bishop, write that Bloomberg and Burnham received the award, "for stonewalling in the face of serious questions about a flawed survey project, which reported more than 600,000 Iraqi deaths from 2003 to 2006," saying, "AAPOR asked for the kind of information that any scientist doing this type of work should release ...
[53]In a 20 November 2006 Slate article, 2 of the Lancet study authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, write: Kaplan claims that the rate was really 10, according to U.N. figures.
The BBC article was reporting from a study of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, titled "Sanctions and childhood mortality in Iraq", that was published in the May 2000 Lancet medical journal.
The 2000 BBC article also reported, "However, it found that infant and child mortality in the autonomous, mainly Kurd region in the North of the country, has actually fallen, perhaps reflecting the more favourable distribution of aid in that area."
[60] Madelyn Hicks, a psychiatrist and public health researcher at King's College London in the UK, says she "simply cannot believe" the paper's claim that 40 consecutive houses were surveyed in a single day.
[62]An 30 October 2006 BBC article reports this response from Lancet study author Les Roberts: In Iraq in 2004, the surveys took about twice as long and it usually took a two-person team about three hours to interview a 30-house cluster.
"[65] The August 2006 Basrah Governorate Assessment Report[66] of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees described death certificate procedures of the Ministry of Health (MoH) as follows: Death certificates, which are needed in order to obtain retirement benefits for a person's surviving spouse or children, as well as for inheritance purposes, are issued by the MoH Births/Deaths Administrative Offices which are located in Public Hospitals.
The following documents are required: In a 20 November 2006 Slate article, 2 of the Lancet study authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, write: In July [2006], for example, the Ministry of Health reported exactly zero violent deaths in Anbar Province, in spite of the contradictory evidence we saw on our televisions.
"[70] Bohannon defended his comments as accurate, citing Burnham saying, in response to questions about why details of selecting "residential streets that did not cross the main avenues", that "in trying to shorten the paper from its original very large size, this bit got chopped, unfortunately."
A letter by Debarati Guha-Sapir, Olivier Degomme and Jon Pedersen argues: "Burnham and colleagues' figure 4, in which cumulated Iraq Body Count deaths parallel their study's mortality rates, is misleading.
The Lancet authors replied, "Josh Dougherty and Debarati Guha-Sapir and colleagues all point out that figure 4 of our report mixes rates and counts, creating a confusing image.
Roberts also said that the US government's Smart Initiative program is spending millions of dollars per year teaching NGOs and UN workers how to use the same cluster method for estimating mortality rates.
For example; this quote from the article; "Over the last 25 years, this sort of methodology has been used more and more often, especially by relief agencies in times of emergency," said Dr. David Rush, a professor and epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston.
[80] Dr. Ben Coghlan, an epidemiologist in Melbourne Australia, writes: The US Congress should agree: in June this year [2006] they unanimously passed a bill outlining financial and political measures to promote relief, security and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The bill was based in part on the veracity of a survey conducted by the Burnet Institute (Melbourne) and the International Rescue Committee (New York) that found 3.9 million Congolese had perished because of the conflict.
While this was more than twice the rate recorded by IBC [Iraq Body Count project] at the time, Pederson expressed concern for the completeness and quality of the data in a newspaper interview last year.
On 14 September 2007, ORB (Opinion Research Business), an independent UK based polling agency, published an estimate of the total casualties of the Iraq war.
