Thursday, October 12, 2006
half a million dead Iraqis
My God. From the Washington Post:
That comes out to about 500 deaths a day around the country due to the war.
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.
...
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."
That comes out to about 500 deaths a day around the country due to the war.
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This is the same research team that did the 2004 survey finding of 100k in "excess mortality" from the 2003 invasion to the middle of 2004. The study makes for interesting reading (and it's only around 10 pages long), even if you don't have a super-sophisticated understanding of statistics. That's because the methods they use are distinctly familiar to all of us--it's how public health officials say, for example, how many Americans smoke, or have heart disease, or diabetes. It's pretty basic random sampling. The result of this study is not exactly 650,000, but a 95% likelihood that it falls between around 450,000 to almost a million. The 650k figure is the "most-likely" figure at the top of the bell curve.
AND...
It's the same method (and in some cases, the same researchers) used to estimate how many dead above the normal mortality rate as a result of violence in Darfur, in the Congo, in Kosovo. Those numbers are generally acceptable to the US government, et al; why not these?
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AND...
It's the same method (and in some cases, the same researchers) used to estimate how many dead above the normal mortality rate as a result of violence in Darfur, in the Congo, in Kosovo. Those numbers are generally acceptable to the US government, et al; why not these?
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