Doug Henwood Talks

Washington Post - October 11, 2006

Study Claims Iraq’s ‘Excess’ Death Toll Has Reached 655,000 By David Brown Washington Post Staff Writer

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000
more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March
2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random
sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than
ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that
President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times
the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British- based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since
the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to
reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the
news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team
calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was
the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from
violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the
study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout
the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by
epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of
Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the
British medical journal the Lancet.

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000
deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was
much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study
estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military,
have died since then — a finding likely to be equally controversial.

Both this and the earlier study are the only ones to estimate
mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. The technique, called
“cluster sampling,” is used to estimate mortality in famines and
after natural disasters.

While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers
believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the
same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey,
which gives the researchers confidence in the methods. The great
majority of deaths were also substantiated by death certificates.

“We’re very confident with the results,” said Gilbert Burnham, a
Johns Hopkins physician and epidemiologist.

A Defense Department spokesman did not comment directly on the estimate.

“The Department of Defense always regrets the loss of any innocent
life in Iraq or anywhere else,” said Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros. “The
coalition takes enormous precautions to prevent civilian deaths and
injuries.”

He added that “it would be difficult for the U.S. to precisely
determine the number of civilian deaths in Iraq as a result of
insurgent activity. The Iraqi Ministry of Health would be in a better
position, with all of its records, to provide more accurate
information on deaths in Iraq.”

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked
at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years,
called the survey method “tried and true,” and added that “this is
the best estimate of mortality we have.”

This viewed was echoed by Sarah Leah Whitson, an official of Human
Rights Watch in New York, who said, “We have no reason to question
the findings or the accuracy” of the survey.

“I expect that people will be surprised by these figures,” she said.
“I think it is very important that, rather than questioning them,
people realize there is very, very little reliable data coming out of
Iraq.”

The survey was conducted between May 20 and July 10 by eight Iraqi
physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They
visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of
seven members each. One person in each household was asked about
deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after.

The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time;
when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates.

According to the survey results, Iraq’s mortality rate in the year
before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the post- invasion period it was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The
difference between these rates was used to calculate “excess deaths.”

Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A
little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male
preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths,
the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15
and 44 years old.

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs
and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey
results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31
percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the
respondents said.

Burnham said that the estimate of Iraq’s pre-invasion death rate –
5.5 deaths per 1,000 people — found in both of the Hopkins surveys
was roughly the same estimate used by the CIA and the U.S. Census
Bureau. He said he believes that attests to the accuracy of his
team’s results.

He thinks further evidence of the survey’s robustness is that the
steepness of the upward trend it found in excess deaths in the last
two years is roughly the same tendency found by other groups — even
though the actual numbers differ greatly.

An independent group of researchers and biostatisticians based in
England produces the Iraq Body Count. It estimates that there have
been 44,000 to 49,000 civilian deaths since the invasion. An Iraqi
nongovernmental organization estimated 128,000 deaths between the
invasion and July 2005.

The survey cost about $50,000 and was paid for by Massachusetts
Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies.

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 7:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.