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October 11, 2006

The Iraq Death Toll Study

Interesting timing.

NEW YORK (AP) -- A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates.

The timing of the survey's release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to call it "politics."

In the new study, researchers attempt to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer.

"Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

The study by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and others is to be published on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal.

I haven't read the actual study, so I can't really make any sort of comment on the numbers or the research method, but I do have a question. Shouldn't medical journals focus on, you know, medicine?

Does everything have to be political?

UPDATE - Just skimmed the methodology section of the report, and the sampling methods are pretty bad. Rick Moran has more.

A debate on the cost of war is welcome, but it should be done with honest data. This sort of thing calls into question the credibility of those who publish such studies, and once again displays an ignorance of basic research methods on the part of news organizations who run stories on such 'reports.' Journalists are suckers for 'reports' from special interest groups, and don't seem to realize that data can be manipulated quite easily, or that sometimes, people might be willing to massage data for political purposes.

Posted by slublog at October 11, 2006 08:37 AM

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Comments

I heard this on NPR this morning (getting my liberal dose of media comes easy when your truck only gets one station...NPR). My though was the same thing...shouldn't they be out curing cancer or something???

Posted by: downfleeced at October 11, 2006 10:14 AM

Must be nice, having a radio. I have a big hole in the dashboard where the radio should be.

Posted by: Slublog at October 11, 2006 10:24 AM

I saw this on Fox this morning, where they mentioned that the margin of error was over 30%, giving the actual figure a range from 400k to 800k. I'm no statistician, but that seems to render the study utterly meaningless. They might as well have invented the figures from thin air.

I also saw it a few minutes later on "Today", and of course the NBC correspondent chose to leave out the 'margin of error' part. Typical.

Posted by: Shoulung at October 11, 2006 10:39 AM

I saw your comment on HotAir after commenting myself at BURKOPHILIA.

The fatal flaw is that they use word of mouth to pre-announce the purpose of the study, and then disregard households that refuse to participate. As you stated, this is no longer a random study, and therefore worthless.

The bias you mention is possible, but I give the survey team and supervisors the benefit of the doubt and assume they were unbiased. However, the two decisions I listed above take the sample out of the researchers hands, and put it into the participants.

Further, any researcher or statistician worth a damn would have known this. This study is crap.

-jcp-

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