[Media-watch] exhange with Blairs private secretary

[John Meed]

Hi David

You have probably already seen this but in case not here is some of what the
Lancet report authors have said in emails to medialens ­ there is more at
http://www.medialens.org/.

Regards

John

We asked the report's authors about the large rise in numbers of estimated
civilian deaths over previous estimates, and also on the ability to make a
reliable body count without bodies. Dr. Gilbert Burnham responded:
"In short, we used a standard survey method that is used all over the world
to estimate mortality. So bodies are not necessary to calculate mortality.
In fact going to the community for household surveys on mortality is the
standard method used for calculating mortality all over the world, and is
probably the method used in the UK census as well, although I am not a
demographer. 
"Anyway, information collected in surveys always produces higher numbers
than 'passive reporting' as many things never get reported. This is the easy
explanation for the differences between iraqbodycount.net, and our survey.
"Further a survey can find other causes of death related to public health
problems such as women dying in childbirth, children dead of infectious
diseases, and elderly unable to reach a source of insulin, which body counts
cannot do--since they collect information from newspaper accounts of deaths
(usually violent ones). Can one estimate national figures on the basis of a
sample? 
"The answer is certainly yes (the basis of all census methods), provided
that the sample is national, households are randomly selected, and great
precautions are taken to eliminate biases. These are all what we did. Now
the precision of the results is mostly dependent on sample size. The bigger
the sample, the more precise the result. We calculated this carefully, and
we had the statistical power to say what we did. Doing a larger sample size
could make the figure more precise (smaller confidence intervals) but would
have entailed risks to the surveyors which we did not want to take, as they
were high enough already.
"Our data have been back and forth between many reviewers at the Lancet and
here in the school (chair of Biostatistics Dept), so we have the scientific
strength to say what we have said with great certainty. I doubt any Lancet
paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent years as this one has!"
(Dr. Gilbert Burnham, email to David Edwards, October 30, 2004)

Channel 4's Tom Clarke had made a further observation:
"The definition of civilian is also unclear. The majority of violent deaths
were among young men who may - or may not - have been insurgents."
The report's lead author, Dr. Les Roberts, responded to this point:
"The civilian question is fair.  About 25% of the population were adult
males.  >70% of people who died in automobile accidents were adult males. 
Presumably, they died more than other demographic groups because they are
out and about more.  46% of people reportedly killed by coalition forces
were adult males.  Thus, some of them may have been combatants, some
probably were not... perhaps they were just out and about more and more
likely to be in targeted areas.  We reported that over half of those killed
by coalition forces were women and children to point out that if there was
targeting, it was not very focused.  Thus, we are careful to say that about
100,000 people, perhaps far more were killed.  We suspect that the vast
majority were civilians, but we do not say each and every one of the
approximately 100,000 was a civilian." (Email to David Edwards, October 31,
2004)


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