Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Posted by Sickboy at 11:57 AM
Not that this study holds any water to whether it is totally accurate or not, but still, its something to think about.....


BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

A New Estimate of Civilian Deaths The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

5 comments:

Mark M said...

Because the study is done using statistical sampling, of course they can't claim total accuracy. However, they use a methodology that is widely accepted in epidemiology. The range 426K to 793K is what's known as a 95% confidence interval. Which means that there is only a 5% chance that they could have observed so many deaths (in their limited sample) if the actual value for the whole population falls outside that range.

The question everyone asks is why there is such a big discrepancy between the Iraqi Body Count (website) numbers and the Lancet study's numbers. Iraqi Body Count only counts the dead that can be verified through reports by Iraqi morgues, government, media, etc. Without a doubt, we can verify that these individuals have been killed. But it only provides a lower bound on the numbers because of potentially vast numbers of deaths that are not reported through these channels. The Lancet study looks at excess deaths, comparing the death rate before and after the invasion. However, since the number is extrapolated from a small sample, the margin of error is large. It is also possible that the number could be inflated through errors in methodology.

To boil it all down... I think it is safe to say that well over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the invasion.

10:14 PM CDT
dad-e~O said...

not to mention the over 2,000 dead us soldiers.

http://www.mininggazette.com/stories/articles.asp?articleID=3930

10:24 AM CDT
dad-e~O said...

Mark, didn't the last "Official US Census" us similiar fuzzy math theories? and create a bit of a stir since it was unconstitutional?

10:25 AM CDT
Mark M said...

PJ... You're thinking of the "post-enumeration" survey. The idea was to compensate for the undercounting of certain classes of U.S. residents by having a separate survey that used statistical sampling to estimate the amount of undercounting. Republicans were opposed to it because they feared that this would increase the number of congressional districts in heavily Democratic areas.

3:05 PM CDT
dad-e~O said...

yea, that's it, similar thories?

7:38 PM CDT

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