LancetIraq

You 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…

Lenin 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…

Mark 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…

Mark 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…

There 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.…

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…

Richard Horton and Gilbert Burnham are interviewed in the Lancet's podcast on the Lancet study.

Zeyad: One problem is that the people dismissing - or in some cases, rabidly attacking - the results of this study, including governmental officials who, arguably, have an interest in doing so, have offered no other alternative or not even a counter estimate. This is called denial. When you have no hard facts to discredit a scientific study, or worse, if you are forced to resort to absurd arguments, such as "the Iraqis are lying," or "they interviewed insurgents," or "the timing to publish this study was to affect American elections," or "I don't like the results and they don't fit into my…

Daniel Davies: This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer - that the study was fraudulent. More Daniel Davies: When someone dies, you get a death certificate from the hospital, morgue or coroner, in your hand. This bit of the death infrastructure is still working in Iraq. Then the person who issued the death certificate is meant to send a copy to…

Democracy Now has an interview with Les Roberts. On the methodology: I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn't very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been…

Latest Tim Blair attempt to refute the Lancet study: Lancet's number of documented deaths in Iraq, upon which the respected medical journal based its Iraqi mortality study, is but a mere 0.0835% of Lancet's estimated post-invasion death total. The "estimate" part of Lancet's equation is 99.9%. Well, I guess that's it for the entire field of statistics.

It seems that war supporters with actual knowledge of statistics aren't willing to criticise the new Lancet study, leaving the field to folks who don't know what they are talking about. John Howard: Well, I don't believe that John Hopkins research, I don't. It's not plausible, it's not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey. I think that's absolutely precarious. It is a ... an unbelievably large number and it's out of whack with most of the other assessments that have been made. Surveys are the best way to measure these things. The other assessments that are lower such as IBC…

If you followed the debate over the first Lancet study you know that it featured numerous attacks on the study from folks who manifestly did not have a clue about statistics. The new study gives us much more of the same. First up is President Bush who said: "I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does Gen. (George) Casey, and neither do Iraqi officials." and (after a lot of waffling) "The methodology is pretty well discredited" Cluster sampling is discredited? Not according to any statistics textbook in the world. Next we have Blue Crab Boulevard: This would be almost 400 (article…

The Washington Post buried the story of 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq on page A12. I don't know what inside page the story appeared on in the New York Times, but look what they had on their website (image to right). Three American deaths are much more important than 600,000 Iraqi ones. Gee, New York Times, you could at least pretend to care. Mind you, there's worse things than burying the study. Malcolm Ritter in the Associated Press did a hatchet job on the study. A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll…

The Lancet study on deaths in Iraq has been released. Get it here. Here's the summary: Background An excess mortality of nearly 100 000 deaths was reported in Iraq for the period March, 2003-September, 2004, attributed to the invasion of Iraq. Our aim was to update this estimate. Methods Between May and July, 2006, we did a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq. 50 clusters were randomly selected from 16 Governorates, with every cluster consisting of 40 households. Information on deaths from these households was gathered. Findings Three misattributed clusters…

The Washington Post reports on a new Lancet study on excess deaths in Iraq. (Though it buries it on page A12.) 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 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…

Stephen Soldz posts an exchange of letters between the IBC's John Sloboda and Les Roberts. Sloboda accused Roberts of spreading misinformation about a NEJM study. Roberts said: In a very prestigious journal called the New England Journal of Medicine there was an article published on 1 July 2004. Military doctors interviewed soldiers returning from Iraq. They interviewed them because they were interested in post-traumatic stress disorder, so they asked the soldiers about stressful things that might have happened to them. Among other things they found that 14 percent of the ground forces in…

UNICEF reports: Despite the laudable efforts of the Public Distribution System (PDS) of food baskets, many of Iraq's poorer households are still food insecure, according to a Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis launched today, based on the most recent data from 2005. ... Roger Wright, UNICEF's Special Representative for Iraq, lamented that children were confirmed as the major victims of food insecurity. "The chronic malnutrition rate of children in food insecure households was as high as 33 per cent, or one out of every three children malnourished," he stated. Chronic malnutrition…

In an earlier post on the IBC I wrote: Sloboda says: We've always said our work is an undercount, you can't possibly expect that a media-based analysis will get all the deaths. Our best estimate is that we've got about half the deaths that are out there. OK, then why does the IBC page say "Iraq Body Count: Max 38661"? That's not really the maximum possible number of deaths, is it? Why not report their estimate that the true number of deaths is 70,000 or so? IBC's Josh Dougherty responded with: No. It's the maximum number of reported civilian deaths, as is stated on their homepage, counters…

Iraq Body Count has published a defence against some of the criticism they have been receiving. The Lancet study implies that there are about five times as many Iraqi deaths as the IBC number. They do not accept this and so are arguing that Lancet estimate is to high and is not corroborated by the ILCS: Comparisons between the Lancet study and ILCS have been attempted in the past, one of the best-known being by British activist Milan Rai. His analysis concludes: "If we crudely scale up the UNDP [IMIRA] figure to take account of the longer Lancet time period, we reach a figure (33,000) which…