Comments on: Nature on Iraq mortality study

By: Ayal Rosenthal

Ayal Rosenthal — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:41:19 +0000

Common sense should have been used as at least a a back-of-the-envelope check on the information that the researchers were providing. There is an enormous difference between 390,000 and 940,000. There is an enormous difference between approx. 150,000 (a general rough estimates casualties) and 390,000. While not impossible, it is not likely that several hundred thousand people can simply disappear in Iraq today. As tioedong wrote - “this is politics”.

By: tioedong

tioedong — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 05:51:47 +0000

Given the fact of the Shiite Sunni divide, it would be interesting to see if the interviewers were Sunni, and if they had prior connections with the Baathist government. After all, we ask doctors if they ever worked for drug companies before doing research on drugs. In this case, the politics of the interviewers, the editor of Lancet and the one who wrote the article suggest that they had a conflict of interest.
Second, the murders of Shiites and Sunni Kurds under the Hussein regieme was a major human rights disaster, were surveys done in 1996? I believe the “excess deaths” from sanctions was also “estimated” to be 600 000 people, mainly children.
Medicine is medicine. Science is science. This is politics, and as a doctor I shudder when political agendas distort the purity of science.

By: joshd

joshd — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 18:59:06 +0000

“Les Roberts, in particular, has said innumerable times that one way to check their findings would be for a reporter to go to a sample of graveyards and find out if the majority of contemporary deaths are from violence, as the Lancet results indicate, or from nonviolent causes as much lower estimates such as that from Iraq Body Count would suggest. I think this would be an excellent idea. It would give a sense of what ballpark we are in. I wish some of the Lancet critics would put a fraction of the energy they spend attempting to discredit the study into inducing a reporter to conduct this work.”

Something you may not have known is that reporters have already conducted that type of work:

“BORZOU DARAGAHI: Well, we think — the Los Angeles Times thinks these [Lancet] numbers are too large, depending on the extensive research we’ve done. Earlier this year, around June, the report was published at least in June, but the reporting was done over weeks earlier. We went to morgues, cemeteries, hospitals, health officials, and we gathered as many statistics as we could on the actual dead bodies, and the number we came up with around June was about at least 50,000.

And that kind of jibed with some of the news report that were out there, the accumulation of news reports, in terms of the numbers kill. The U.N. says that there’s about 3,000 a month being killed; that also fits in with our numbers and with morgue numbers. This number of 600,000 or more killed since the beginning of the war, it’s way off our charts.”

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec06/iraq_10-11.html

Does this give you a much better sense that we’re closer to IBC’s “ballpark” than Lancet’s, as you suggest it would in your post?

Whether it does or doesn’t, there should be more such work, as the value of what it can provide goes well beyond the “IBC or Lancet ballpark” question.

By: Robert Shone

Robert Shone — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:41:39 +0000

Stephen Soldz wrote:
>> But the main street bias, if it exists, seems likely to be
>> a somewhat minor issue.

How do you know, Stephen? What research have you carried out? Your earlier remarks on main street bias (eg your unfortunate misrepesresentation of Jon Pedersen on this issue) made me think that you haven’t really understood the main street bias issue. Perhaps here’s an opportunity for you to expand on why you think it’s a “somewhat minor issue” - rather than simply making unsupported assertions.