LancetIraq
tlambert | August 7, 2007The AP's Paul Foy reports on the American Statistical Association meetings discussion on the Lancet studies:
Number crunchers this week quibbled with Roberts's survey methods and blasted his refusal to release all his raw data for scrutiny -- or any data to his worst critics. Some discounted him as an advocate for world peace, although none could find a major flaw in his surveys or analysis.
"Most of the criticism I heard was carping," said Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "I thought the surveys were pretty good for non-statisticians…
tlambert | July 29, 2007Long time readers will be familiar with the epic that is Michael Fumento's attempt to debunk the first Lancet survey. A summary can't really do it justice, but what basically happened is that Fumento dismissed the 100,000 number because he claimed that they included Falluja when they should have left it out. When I explained that they had left Falluja out, rather than admit to making a mistake, Fumento repeatedly and loudly insisted that the 100,000 number came from including Falluja. Now he's claiming to be vindicated by David Kane's critique. Kane, of course, is arguing that the Lancet…
tlambert | July 27, 2007Daniel Davies summarizes what is wrong with David Kane's criticism:
The mathematical guts of the paper is that under certain assumptions, the addition of the very violent cluster in Fallujah can add so much uncertainty to the estimate of the post-invasion death rate that it stretches the bottom end of the 95% confidence interval for the risk rate below 1. From this, David Kane concludes that the paper was wrong to reject the hypothesis that the Iraq War had not made things worse.
Let's back up and look at that again. Under David Kane's assumptions, the discovery of the Fallujah cluster was a…
tlambert | July 24, 2007David Kane has asked me to post his argument that
Roberts et al. (2004) claim that the risk of death increased by
2.5-fold (95% CI 1.6-4.2) in Iraq after the US-led invasion. I provide
evidence that, given the other data presented in their paper, this confidence
interval must be wrong. Comments and corrections are welcome.
Let me kick things off with my comment:
His argument turns on the CI for the post-invasion mortality rate (including Falluja) of 1.4-23.2. I would suggest that he has proven that this CI is wrong (as it obviously is, since there is no way the mortality rate could be…
tlambert | July 17, 2007DWE reports:
Dr. Lafta has now been allowed to visit Canada, where he is meeting with researchers from the University of Washington and Simon Fraser University. On Friday, he'll be participating in a live interactive webcast.
Dr. Riyadh Lafta
Al Mustansiriya University, Baghdad Iraq
"Death in Iraq"
Friday, July 20, 2007, 7:00 pm
Live interactive Webcast in Seattle:
UW School of Social Work, Room 305, 4101 15th Ave NE
In Person:
Wosk Center for Dialogue, 518 W. Hastings St. Vancouver BC, CANADA
tlambert | June 25, 2007James Wimberly updates estimates of deaths in Iraq. If you extrapolate from Lancet 2, the death toll is now over a million. Which sort of explains why the coalition won't do counts of their own.
Elsewhere, David Kane has put an R package for the Lancet data and his own discussion of the data. One interesting thing is that 24 of the deaths from car bombs (out of 38 deaths) occured in a single incident.
tlambert | May 26, 2007It turns out that global warming denialist Sinclair Davidson is also a Lancet denialist:
The Carson piece tells us it's impossible to spray 3/4 of the houses in malarial areas. Yet, the Lancet tells us a research team went to every house in Baghdad (at 15 min per house, in the middle of the day, in a war-zone).
And as well as not understanding confidence intervals, Davidson doesn't understand random sampling. In order to estimate the number of deaths in Baghdad you don't have to visit every house, just a random sample of them.
Update: After eight more comments where he accused me of being…
tlambert | April 28, 2007The Globe and Mail has a story about Riyadh Lafta:
Riyadh Lafta, who co-authored a controversial study that estimated the war-related deaths at more than half a million, had planned to tell students at Simon Fraser University about his work and then spend a week in retreat near West Vancouver, writing a paper about an alarming rise in cancers among Iraqi children.
He would have left Canada today. Instead, he taught to all-but-empty classes at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, with students fearful of attacks choosing to not leave their homes.
"This country is a killing machine," said Dr…
tlambert | April 23, 2007Gilbert Burnham has been interviewed (subscription required, copy here). Some extracts:
Why do you think your survey has been criticised?
These are unpleasant results, and they are associated with a war that has seriously divided the countries participating. Some people felt that we were not supporting the troops and were unpatriotic. I am not angry about that. As malicious as some of the hate mail I received is, I can see their point of view because I was in the military, in a combat unit in Korea during Vietnam. These soldiers in Iraq are volunteers, by and large, with good intentions, and…
tlambert | April 20, 2007The Lancet authors have released the data to other researchers:
Six months have passed since the publication of the study and we feel the time is now right to make the data set available to academic and other scientific groups whom we judge have the technical capacity to objectively analyze the data. It is our desire that the data be used in a way that will advance the understanding of how to best assess mortality during conflicts and to improve the protection of those caught in conflict. Although conflict is inextricably intertwined with national and international politics, it is our very…
tlambert | April 18, 2007The Globe and Mail reports:
After he couldn't get a visa to tell Americans about an alarming rise in cancer levels among Iraqi children, a renowned Iraqi epidemiologist has been told he can't fly through Britain en route to give a similar talk in Canada.
Riyadh Lafta -- best known for a controversial study in the respected medical journal The Lancet that estimated Iraq's war dead at more than half a million -- said in an e-mail to his U.S. research colleagues that he had two choices: Fly to England without the transit visa, or turn around and go home.
University officials were working hard…
tlambert | April 13, 2007The Globe and Mail has more details about Lafta's visit to Simon Fraser:
A highly regarded Iraqi epidemiologist who wants to tell Americans about an alarming rise in cancer levels among Iraqi children will come to Canada instead because he couldn't get a visa to the United States.
Unable to travel to the University of Washington, Riyadh Lafta -- best known for a controversial study that estimated Iraq's body count in the U.S.-led war in Iraq at more than half a million -- will arrive at Simon Fraser University in B.C. this month to give a lecture and meet with research associates.
Dr. Lafta…
tlambert | April 7, 2007Nature has published a letter (subscription required) from Roberts and Burnham responding to this story.
In our opinion, your News story about our Lancet paper "Death toll in Iraq: survey team takes on new critics" (Nature 446, 6-7; 2007) has confused the matter rather than clarified it. You outline three criticisms of our work: that there was not enough time to have conducted the survey; that the sampling method suffered from a 'main-street bias'; and that the study team fabricated the data (the last being attributed to anonymous "researchers"). These criticisms have been previously…
tlambert | April 7, 2007The IBC is chastising publications that cite the Lancet estimate of Iraqi deaths. lenin comments:
So what is the point of IBC expending so much energy and writing to various organisations to cast baseless or irrelevant aspersions on the Lancet study in this bizarre, ritualistic fashion? As others have pointed out, they don't seem to make this much effort to correct news media who misuse their figures by claiming that they represent the total number of deaths, which even the IBC doesn't claim. As I said before, its about defending their turf. Since their method involves relying on media…
tlambert | March 30, 2007Gilbert Burnham on the revelation that the British government's scientific advisors told them not to criticize the Lancet study:
We never had any doubt that the study would stand the test of time, it was designed with a lot of input from people who are leaders in their field and it was carried out in as robust a manner as we could, under the circumstances, so I was always certain that in the end the materials and the results would stand up to very close scrutiny.
Richard Horton on the British government's response to the Lancet study:
Would it welcome the Hopkins study as an important…
tlambert | March 26, 2007The BBC used a Freedom of Information Request to find out what the scientific advice to the British government about the Lancet study was:
The British government was advised against publicly criticising a report estimating that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the war, the BBC has learnt.
Iraqi Health Ministry figures put the toll at less than 10% of the total in the survey, published in the Lancet.
But the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser said the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study design was "robust".
Another statistician agreed the method was "tried…
tlambert | March 9, 2007Daniel Davies comments on the attempted disproof by incredulity of the Lancet numbers:
I am curious as to why anyone is bothering with this debate any more (in some of the discussion on Dr Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hick's comments, it has got parodic, as people discuss the minutiae of the "informed consent" requirements of the questionnaire). Does anyone think at this late date that they are going to come up with a result that proves that the whole war and occupation has been really good for the Iraqis? Have they not noticed that this debate (and the one on global warming too) is a bit like the…
tlambert | March 7, 2007The Australian doesn't just make war on climate science, they don't like epidemiology either, printing Anjana Ahuja's hatchet job on the Lancet study.
Greta at Radio Open Source has posted a response from Les Roberts:
The two main criticisms which were in both the Nature article and The Times article are completely without merit. They said there wasn't enough time to have done the interviews. We had eight interviewers working ten hour days for 49 days, they had two hours in the field to ask each household five questions. They had time.
The other criticism was that our people stayed close to…
tlambert | March 5, 2007Anjana Ahuja has written an extraordinarily one-sided article attacking the Lancet study. She drags out the same criticisms that were covered in the Nature story, but even though she cites the Nature piece, she carefully avoids mentioning the Lancet authors' replies, or the opinions of the researchers supporting the study. Ahuja also makes many factual errors, even going as far as claiming that one of the interviewers contradicted Burnham when, in fact, they supported him. All of Ahuja's errors are in the direction of supportting her case, suggesting that she is biased.
Ahuja begins:
Iraq…
tlambert | March 1, 2007Nature has a news story by Jim Giles on the criticisms of the study from IBC supporters.
Several researchers, including Madelyn Hicks, a psychiatrist at King's College London, recently published criticisms of the study's methodology in The Lancet (369, 101-105; 2007). One key question is whether the interviews could have been done in the time stated. The October paper implied that the interviewers worked as two teams of four, each conducting 40 interviews a day -- a very high number given the need to obtain consent and the sensitive nature of the questions.
The US authors subsequently said…