LancetIraq
tlambert | February 28, 2007Gilbert Burnham has just given a talk at MIT on the Lancet studies on deaths in Iraq. You can watch the video here.
Some of things he mentioned:
USAID (which has expertise in cluster sampling) was told to look for holes in the study, but couldn't find any.
They will soon release the data (with identifying material removed) to other researchers.
John Howard's idiotic comment "it's not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey" got a laugh.
The IBC made vociferous attacks on the studies because they want to defend their methods, and Les Roberts suggests that IBC are trying to stop…
tlambert | February 24, 2007The AP reports:
Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. forces have lost their lives in
Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. But they woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed.
When the poll was conducted earlier this month, a little more than 3,100 U.S. troops had been killed. The midpoint estimate among those polled was right on target, at about 3,000.
While the media have given Americans a good idea how many Americans have died, they've failed to do the same for Iraqi deaths:
Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated at more than 54,000 and could be much…
tlambert | February 14, 2007Les Roberts in the Independent:
On both sides of the Atlantic, a process of spinning science is preventing a serious discussion about the state of affairs in Iraq.
The government in Iraq claimed last month that since the 2003 invasion between 40,000 and 50,000 violent deaths have occurred. Few have pointed out the absurdity of this statement.
There are three ways we know it is a gross underestimate. First, if it were true, including suicides, South Africa, Colombia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia have experienced higher violent death rates than Iraq over the past four…
tlambert | February 9, 2007Last October, the story of how there were 650,000 or so excess Iraqi deaths in the war wasn't important enough to make the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. In today's paper I see that the death of a minor American celebrity gets five out of eight columns on the front page.
tlambert | February 7, 2007Dale Keiger's article on the Lancet studies is now online:
Newspapers the world over put the number in their headlines. Reporters tried to explain it, often bungling the job. To dismiss the research, critics seized on its implausibility, in the process frequently distorting its meaning. Political leaders dodged its implications by brushing it aside as the meaningless product of a discredited methodology. In a leading scientific journal, other scientists challenged how the study had been done.
tlambert | February 6, 2007Eli Rabett has some extracts from a 5,000 word article by Dale Keiger on the Lancet studies that appeared in the Johns Hopkins Alumni Journal. Keiger says that it will be available online in a few days.
Update: Here it is.
tlambert | January 5, 2007Taylor Owen at Oxblog on the reaction to the Lancet studies
"The principal question is why are we so surprised that this level of conflict would result in such levels of excess mortality?
I would argue it is a direct result of our sanitised view of war. We consider the costs of war to be limited to direct conflict casualties. Bombs killing our soldiers, bullets killing insurgents, end of story. This of course if only the beginning, excess death levels tell the other side. The failure to provide humanitarian protection has real human costs, far beyond those directly killed by munitions.
And…
tlambert | December 22, 2006Radio Open Source has a program on the Lancet study with comments from Les Roberts, Colin Kahl (arguing that the number is too high), Juan Cole and Iraqi bloggers.
tlambert | December 12, 2006Stephen Soldz has a nice summary of the congressional briefing on the Lancet study:
Les Roberts again made the point that their data implies that the majority of deaths in Iraq are from violence, whereas alternative accounts from Iraq Body Count, the Brookings Institution, or the Iraq Ministry of Health imply that only a small percentage, perhaps 10%, of deaths in Iraq are from violence. He again, as he has done since the study came out in early October, has called upon the press to visit graveyards and ask if the majority of deaths is from nonviolent or violent causes. Roberts again called,…
tlambert | December 9, 2006Via Stephen Soldz
WASHINGTON - December 8 - In a bipartisan Congressional briefing hosted by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) and Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) the authors of the Lancet Study, which found that as many as 650,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during the war, will present their full findings to Congress.
The briefing will take place Monday, December 11th from 10:00am - 12:00pm in 2247 Rayburn House Office Building.
tlambert | December 5, 2006The latest issue of the Walkley Magazine has an article I wrote about the media coverage of the Lancet study. They haven't made it available on line, so I've put a copy below the fold.
Imagine an alternate Earth. Let's call it Earth 2. On Earth 2, just like our planet, there was a Boxing Day tsunami that killed about a quarter of a million people. On our planet the tsunami was front page news for days and because of the horrendous death toll people opened their hearts and their wallets. On Earth 2 the reaction to the tsunami's death toll was different. The story was in the papers for…
tlambert | December 1, 2006Too much has been made of the claims about main street bias in the new Lancet study -- if you do a few calculations you'll find that even if it exists, it doesn't make much difference. As Jon Pedersen said:
Pedersen did NOT think that there was anything to the "Main Street Bias" issue. He agreed, I thought, that, if there was a bias, it might be away from main streets [by picking streets which intersect with main streets]. In any case, he thought such a "bias", if it had existed, would affect results only 10% or so.
But now Johnson, Spagat and co have put together a working paper where they…
tlambert | November 30, 2006Stephen Soldz has posted his discussion with Jon Pedersen about the new Lancet study:
[Pedersen thinks that the] prewar mortality is too low. This would be due to recall issues. ...
Pedersen thought that people were likely reporting nonviolent deaths as violent ones.
These two have to go together. If prewar mortality was too low because people forget to mention prewar deaths, it would have shown up as a significant increase in non-violent deaths. Which didn't happen, so Pedersen must also believe that a significant number of deaths were misclassifed. I don't see how this is possible,…
tlambert | November 26, 2006Science has Burnham and Roberts' reply (subscription required) to the criticisms that Science published on Lancet 2:
Bohannon fails to appreciate that cluster sampling is a random
sampling method. Sampling for our study was designed to give all
households an equal chance of being included. In this multistage
cluster sampling, random selections were made at several levels ending
with the "start" house being randomly chosen. From there, the house
with the nearest front door was sampled until 39 consecutive houses
were selected. This usually involved a chain of houses extending into
two or three…
tlambert | November 21, 2006Glenn Reynolds, Nov 21:
IRAQ: "So far this month, the civilian casualty count is well below the casualty count in October and below the six-month average. The security force casualties reduced 21 percent over the past four weeks, and are at the lowest level in 25 weeks, he said."
Associated Press, Nov 20
Gunmen shot and killed a television comedian Monday who was famous for mocking everyone from the Iraqi government to U.S. forces to Shiite militias to Sunni insurgents.
Walid Hassan's slaying came as the Iraqi death toll rose to more than 1,300 for the first 20 days of November - the highest…
tlambert | November 20, 2006Slate has published a response from Burnham and Roberts to Kaplan's botched criticism of Lancet 2.
Kaplan's latest article focused on two baseless criticisms of our 2006 study. First, he claimed that our measured base line rate, the rate of natural deaths for the year before the invasion, was too low. We had estimated the rate to be 5.5 deaths per thousand per year. Kaplan claims that the rate was really 10, according to U.N. figures. He wrote, "[I]f Iraq's pre-invasion rate really was 5.5 per 1,000, it was lower than almost every country in the Middle East, and many countries in Europe."…
tlambert | November 18, 2006Sheldon Rampton has a nice summary of the reactions to the new Lancet study. He concludes:
Even so, the results of the Lancet study, combined with what we know about the limitations of other attempts to count the dead, suggest that the war in Iraq has already claimed hundreds of thousands rather than tens of thousands of lives.
It is rather striking, moreover, that critics of this research have mostly avoided calling for additional, independent studies that could provide a scientific basis for either confirming or refuting its alarming findings
Meanwhile, David Kane has started a blog just…
tlambert | November 9, 2006CBS news reports
Iraq's Health Minister Ali al-Shemari said about 150,000 Iraqis have been killed by insurgents since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
For every person killed about three have been wounded in violence since the war started in March 2003, al-Shemari told reporters during a visit to Vienna. He did not explain how he arrived at the figure, which is three times most other estimates.
The health minister also said the United States should hand Iraqis full control of its army and police force. Doing so, he said, would allow the Iraqi government to bring the violence under control…
tlambert | November 6, 2006This American Life have a show on Lancet 1 and Lancet 2. Much of it is a repeat of their story on Lancet 1, which is well worth listening to if you haven't already. Their comments on Lancet 2 are in the last ten minutes.
The National Interest has an interview with Les Roberts where he answers all the criticisms of the study. They also invited the IBC to comment but they declined saying that they were too busy keeping track of deaths in Iraq. Curiously, the last death added to the IBC database was on October 12, the day after the Lancet study was released.
tlambert | October 31, 2006The BBC did not publish all of Les Roberts' answers. Here are the rest:
It seems the Lancet has been overrun by left-wing sixth formers.
The report has a flawed methodology and deceit is shown in the counting process. What is your reaction to that? --Ian, Whitwick, UK
Almost every researcher who studies a health problem is opposed to that health problem. For example, few people who study measles empathize with the virus. Thus, given that war is an innately political issue, and that people examining the consequences of war are generally opposed to the war's conception and continuation, it…