tlambert | October 21, 2006Daniel Davies was on the radio talking about the Lancet study.
Richard Miniter interviews Gilbert Burnham.
Deena Beasley reports what experts in cluster sampling think of the study:
"Over the last 25 years, this sort of methodology has been used more and more often, especially by relief agencies in times of emergency," said Dr. David Rush, a professor and epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston. ...
Rush, speaking at a meeting in Los Angeles on the medical consequences of the Iraq war, said that the relatively small size of the sample -- 1,849 households -- doesn't change the findings,…
tlambert | October 21, 2006I guess that the next time a new physics study comes out Science will ask epidemiologists what they think of it. You see, John Bohannon, the reporter for Science, decided that opinions from a couple of physicists and an economist were more important than getting comments from experts in epidemiology.
Bohannon report on the Lancet study (subscription required) states:
Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley, physicists at Oxford University in the
U.K. who have been analyzing Iraqi casualty data for a separate study,
also question whether the sample is representative. The paper
indicates that the survey…
tlambert | October 19, 2006The Washington Post has hosted a on-line discussion with Gilbert Burnham. Some snippets:
"One last point that is hard for many people to understand. The number of people or households interviewed and the number of clusters used does NOT depend on the population of the country. At a certain point, taking more samples from more clusters does not increase the validity of the answer--and we calculated those levels before the survey."
"Keeping bias out of sampling is a huge challenge, and we spend much of our time before a survey thinking about this. People living close together are more likely…
tlambert | October 19, 2006I asked Les Roberts to comment on Moore's piece. He wrote:
I read with interest the October 18th editorial by Steven Moore reviewing our study reporting that an estimated 650,000 deaths were associated with the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. I had spoken with Mr. Moore the week before when he said that he was writing something for the Wall Street Journal to put this survey in perspective. I am not surprised that we differed on the current relevance of 10 year-old census data in a country that had experienced a major war and mass exodus. I am not surprised at his rejection of my…
tlambert | October 19, 2006river
The responses were typical- war supporters said the number was nonsense because, of course, who would want to admit that an action they so heartily supported led to the deaths of 600,000 people (even if they were just crazy Iraqis...)? Admitting a number like that would be the equivalent of admitting they had endorsed, say, a tsunami, or an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, or the occupation of a developing country by a ruthless superpower... oh wait- that one actually happened. Is the number really that preposterous? Thousands of Iraqis are dying every month- that…
tlambert | October 19, 2006Jim Giles talked to epidemiology experts about the Lancet study. (Nature subscription required):
Data from other conflicts show that such sampling is much more accurate than media reports, which usually account for no more than 20% of deaths. "Random counts force you to go to places that aren't convenient," says Jana Asher, a researcher with the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. "The media don't wander off to distant locations. It's a very different type of data collection."
Death tolls from Iraqi health officials,…
tlambert | October 18, 2006It never ceases to amaze me the way the Wall Street Journal combines superb news coverage with a completely clueless editorial page.
To balance an excellent news article by Carl Bialik on the first Lancet study, we have an innumerate article on the editorial page by Steven E. Moore. Moore claims that the sample size for the Lancet study is too small:
However, the key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points. In their 2006 report, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional sample survey," the Johns Hopkins team says it used 47 cluster points for…
tlambert | October 18, 2006Rebecca Goldin:
While the Lancet numbers are shocking, the study's methodology is not. The scientific community is in agreement over the statistical methods used to collect the data and the validity of the conclusions drawn by the researchers conducting the study. When the prequel to this study appeared two years ago by the same authors (at that time, 100,000 excess deaths were reported), the Chronicle of Higher Education published a long article explaining the support within the scientific community for the methods used. President Bush, however, says he does "not consider it a credible…
tlambert | October 18, 2006If you read the comment threads on the Lancet study you will know that David Kane frequently pops up with dark hints the authors committed some sort of fraud. Well now he has argued that the Lancet study is likely to be a fraud because the response rate was so high. [Update The post has been removed because the "tone is unacceptable, the facts are shoddy, and the ideas are not endorsed by myself, the other authors on the sidebar, or the Harvard IQSS"] Kieran Healy smacks him down:
Kane says, "I can not find a single example of a survey with a 99%+ response rates in a large sample for any…
tlambert | October 17, 2006Anthony Wells:
So, what could have gone wrong? The more excitable fringes of the US blogosphere have come out with some interesting stuff. Let's look at criticisms that don't hold water first.
Firstly, the turnout is unbelievably high. The report suggests that over 98% of people contacted agreed to be interviewed. For anyone involved in market research in this country the figure just sounds stupid. Phone polls here tend to get a response rate of something like 1 in 6. However, the truth is that - incredibly - response rates this high are the norm in Iraq. Earlier this year Johnny Heald of ORB…
tlambert | October 17, 2006Bill S.2125 was unanimously passed by the Senate and promotes relief, security and democracy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It states:
(5) A mortality study completed in December 2004 by the International
Rescue Committee found that 31,000 people were dying monthly and
3,800,000 people had died in the previous 6 years because of the
conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and resulting
disintegration of the social service infrastructure and that
"improving and maintaining security and increasing simple, proven and
cost-effective interventions such as basic medical care,…
tlambert | October 17, 2006You would have hoped the editors of Slate would have taken into account the way Fred Kaplan's innumerate criticism of Lancet 1 was shredded, but they've gone and published an attack on the study by Christopher Hitchens, who knows less about random sampling than Kaplan. I already caught Hitchens lying about the first Lancet study, so you can probably guess what it's going to be like. Let's go:
The word lancet means either an old-fashioned surgical knife used to open a vein for the once-popular cure-all remedy of "bleeding" or "bloodletting," or (in architecture, especially Gothic) a rather…
tlambert | October 17, 2006Lenin on the IBC attack on the Lancet study
I had anticipated that the team behind Iraq Body Count would react to the latest survey on Iraqi mortalities published in the Lancet by trying to minimise their import and undermine their reliability. I was not wrong. The reason is fairly simple: they're defending their turf. They have been engaged in this operation ever since Media Lens asked them what they thought of the fact that mainstream media outlets were using their figures as reliable maximum estimates of the dead, and why they didn't challenge this evident untruth even though they…
tlambert | October 16, 2006Radar has a list of America's Dumbest Congressmen. Number 3 is Inhofe:
Inhofe is best known for his categorical claim that global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" -- a rhetorical flourish he recently refined by likening climate change theories to Nazi propaganda. And here's the scary part: Those are the sentiments of our chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. It's a bit like making Lyndon LaRouche the American Ambassador to England.
But that's not the half of it. As far back as 1972, he called for Democratic presidential nominee George…
tlambert | October 16, 2006The Tripoli six are five doctors and a nurse who were tortured until they confessed to deliberately infecting their patients with HIV. Revere has the latest on the campaign to free them. Mike Dunford list things you can do to help.
tlambert | October 16, 2006Mark Kleiman:
Yes, the survey projected 600,000 excess deaths based on 547 actually reported deaths. That's what "sampling" means, doofus. Every four years, pollsters in the U.S. project the results of voting by 100,000,000 people based on samples of 1000 or so, and get within a few percentage points.
The interviewers asked for death certificates, and mostly saw them. But the estimated number of fatalities is much larger than the total mortality figures compiled by Moqtada al-Sadr's Ministry of Health. Either the sampling is off, or the interviewers were lying, or the families were showing…
tlambert | October 15, 2006Mark Goldblatt mounts an attack on the Lancet study:
The JHBSPH study attempts to calculate the number of civilian deaths "above what would have occurred without conflict." I wonder, therefore, if the survey group was taking into account the effects of United Nations sanctions on Iraq prior the invasion -- which, if the conflict hadn't occurred, would logically still be in place. According to U.N. studies using similar methodologies to those utilized by JHBSPH, roughly 150,000 civilians, more than half of them children, were dying every year as a direct result of U.N. sanctions. Since the…
tlambert | October 14, 2006There is an interview with Randi Rhodes on the study.
The BBC's Paul Reynolds now has a response from Roberts to some of the criticisms:
"There have to be ~300 deaths per day from natural cause even if Iraq was the healthiest 26 million people in the world. Where are those bodies? When the MOH [ministry of health] in Iraq is perhaps recording 10% of them, why should they be doing better with politically charged violent deaths. Yes, I think almost nothing is getting reported outside of Baghdad where things are worse."
"There has rarely been a scientific report so easily verified or discarded.…
tlambert | October 14, 2006
Lindsay Beyerstein spanks Tim Blair:
Having dismissed statistical reasoning, Tim Blair goes on to reject peer review.
It's amazing the lengths some folks will go to avoid believing that the invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of people. I would have thought the big tough war bloggers would be telling the rest of us to suck up the hard truth and press onwards to the Glorious Outcome (whatever it is now). It is worth it, isn't it guys?
Instead, they're pulling the covers over their heads and saying, "What dead people?"
Blair fights back with his leet proofreading skills: Beyerstein…
tlambert | October 14, 2006Richard Horton and Gilbert Burnham are interviewed in the Lancet's podcast on the Lancet study.