Psyche, Science, and Society

Iraq health declining. Les Roberts cited by NYT as expert

April 19th, 2007

According to the New York Times,, the World Health Organization reports that public health is deteriorating:

As a result of these multiple public-health failings, diarrhea and respiratory infections now account for two-thirds of the deaths of children under five, the report said. Twenty-one percent of Iraqi children are now chronically malnourished, according to a 2006 national survey conducted by Unicef, which puts them at risk for both stunted growth and mental development.

And, in what may be a first for the New York Times, they quote Les Robert, of the Lancet Iraq mortality study fame, as an expert, without any language dismissing him as crazed or politically biased:

“There has been so much violence for so long that the result is inevitably this kind of complete social decay,” said Dr. Les Roberts, a principal researcher in a series of public health surveys on mortality among Iraqi citizens whose controversial results have been published in the British journal Lancet.

He says he believes that some of the new data vastly underestimates the human tragedy. “The W.H.O. has done a great job in walking a tightrope,” said Dr. Roberts, who was formerly at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and now heads the program on forced migration and health at Columbia University. “They are telling the world that the Iraqi health situation is really bad and likely to get worse, but doing it within the political constraints of respecting government numbers.”

He said, for example, that the report of 100 deaths a day from violence was “a gross underestimate,” placing the probable tally at several times higher.

The health situation continues to decline :

Dr. Khalid Shibib, of the W.H.O., said that most of the public health figures were “better a few years ago” because “loss of electricity and displacement of people have led to a deterioration of our public services and lack of access.”

“If the environmental situation continues to deteriorate, there will be increased diarrheal diseases, such as cholera,” he said. “Also, if there continues to be so many displaced people who are crowded together — maybe living with relatives — there will be a great rise in respiratory diseases, maybe even tuberculosis.”

And health care is declining as doctors and nurses flee and ethnic conflict infects health facilities. As a result:

The report cites the Iraqi government as saying that almost 70 percent of critically injured patients die in the hospital because of lack of staff, drugs and equipment.

Entry Filed under: Healthcare, Human Rights, Injury, Iraq, Mortality, Public Health, War and Peace