On The Margins

Thursday October 12, 2006

[ Society ] The Lancet Report on Mortality and War

When research has claims intensely relevant to our world, it deserves a studied reception.

If I had not quite accidentally turned to Guardian last night and bumped into a story there by its health editor Sarah Boseley ("655000 Iraqis Killed Since Invasion"),  I would have never known of the Lancet Medical Journal research report on excess mortality in Iraq since the 2003 U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation.

Scholars from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Prof. Gilbert Burnham, MD, Shannon Doocy PhD and Les Roberts PhD) and Al Mustansiriya University School of Medicine (Prof Riyadh Lafta MD) who conducted the research using well-established statistical methodologies share the summary of their findings in their report ("Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey"):

The Lancet report can be accessed through a free registration, which is well worth it because it puts a great deal of other useful medical research at one's finger tips.

Unfortunately, as I noted above, I would not have noticed the report if I had not turned to The Guardian yesterday. 

Here's Guardian's summary of other important conclusions in the research report:

The epidemiological research was carried out on the ground by teams of doctors moving from house to house, questioning families and examining death certificates. Between May and July this year, they visited 1,849 households in 47 separated clusters across the length and breadth of Iraq. The doctors asked about deaths among members of the household in a period before the invasion, from January 2002 to March 2003, and about deaths since. In 92% of cases, they were shown death certificates confirming the cause.

A total of 629 deaths were reported, of which 547 - or 87% - occurred after the invasion. The mortality rate before the war was 5.5 per 1,000, but since the invasion, it has risen to 13.3 per 1,000 per year, they say. Between June 2005 and June 2006, the mortality rate hit a high of 19.8 per 1,000.

Financial Times carries an article its page 5 on Thursday (October 12, 2006) focused on the reserach report but makes a gross rounding error in the estimate given in the article heading: "Lancet survey suggests 600,000 have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion". The errors in this article heading are glaring and should have caught the eye of any astute editor. First, the survey was conducted by John Hopkins researchers and their Iraqi research partner; second, in the report they published in the Lancet, they note that there has been 654,965 excess deaths since the invasion; finally, I could not find any valid roundings of 654,965 to 600,000. (One wonders whether the editors have forgotten their grade-school math when they write headlines.) The online version of the FT article, carries a different, slightly more accurate title.

Turning to The Wall Street Journal, I found nothing that caught the eye in the print paper on the same day. The Journal only carried a mention of the report in its online edition through an Associated Press report titled "The Army Doesn't Plan Cuts in Iraq." One would have imagined this sort of study should receive greater attention in the U.S.

According to Financial Times, President Bush has called the methodology of the study "pretty well discredited."

The Guardian also reports that "Speaking at the Foreign Office launch, the foreign secretary [Margaret Beckett] admitted that the British government did not keep a tally of fatalities, but 'that doesn't mean that one has to accept every figure someone comes up with'."

Commentary on the research by Lancet editor, Richard Horton, can be found here.

The John Hopkins news release on the research can be found here.

A critique of the report by Iraq Body Count can be found here.

Regardless of whether this study is definitive, it comes at a time when framers of public opinion continue to bellow (one might say cruel and inhuman) utilitarian calculations arguing about the exact number of excess civilian deaths and whether they were worth it or not as if the worth of lives can easily be measured against each other. (A dose of Confucian philosophy may be in order.) Utilitarian arguments which trade off engineering of so-called "social goods" against innocent people's lives tend to blunt and blind the observers' moral compass to the human toll and disaster being left behind by the invasion and the continuing occupation. Whether the one source or another give the correct number of deaths, the cold shoulder all mortality accounts have received within the media can hardly be missed if you consider the scale and the significance of their findings.

2006-10-12 23:56:59.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.