[Media-watch] Household survey sees 100, 000 Iraqi deaths - ABC - 28 October 2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=206232
Household Survey Sees 100,000 Iraqi Deaths


LONDON Oct 28, 2004 - A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that 
as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 
18 months since the U.S.-led invasion than would be expected based on the 
death rate before the war.

There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the 
conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 
30,000. As of Wednesday, 1,081 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to 
the U.S. Defense Department.

The scientists who wrote the report concede that the data they based their 
projections on were of "limited precision," because the quality of the 
information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the 
study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.

Designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia 
University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the study is being 
published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet medical journal.

The survey indicated violence accounted for most of the extra deaths seen 
since the invasion, and airstrikes from coalition forces caused most of the 
violent deaths, the researchers wrote in the British-based journal.

"Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and 
children," they said.

The report was released just days before the U.S. presidential election, and 
the lead researcher said he wanted it that way. The Lancet routinely 
publishes papers on the Web before they appear in print, particularly if it 
considers the findings of urgent public health interest.

Those reports then appear later in the print issue of the journal. The 
journal's spokesmen said they were uncertain which print issue the Iraqi 
report would appear in and said it was too late to make Friday's issue, and 
possibly too late for the Nov. 5 edition.

Les Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the article's 
timing was up to him.

"I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the 
election," Roberts told The Asocciated Press. "My motive in doing that was 
not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the 
campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian 
lives in Iraq.

"I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but 
I think that our science has transcended our perspectives," Roberts said. 
"As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this."

Richard Peto, an expert on study methods who was not involved with the 
research, said the approach the scientists took is a reasonable one to 
investigate the Iraq death toll.

However, it's possible that they may have zoned in on hotspots that might 
not be representative of the death toll across Iraq, said Peto, a professor 
of medical statistics at Oxford University in England.

Lancet editor Richard Horton wrote in an editorial accompanying the survey 
that more household clusters would have improved the precision of the 
report, "but at an enormous and unacceptable risk to the team of 
interviewers."

"This remarkable piece of work represents the efforts of a courageous team 
of scientists," he wrote.

To conduct the survey, investigators visited 33 neighborhoods spread evenly 
across the country in September, randomly selecting clusters of 30 
households to sample. Of the 988 households visited, 808, consisting of 
7,868 people, agreed to participate. Each group At each one they asked how 
many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths there had been 
since January 2002.

The scientists then compared death rates in the 15 months before the 
invasion with those that occurred during the 18 months after the attack and 
adjusted those numbers to account for the different time periods.

Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey is considered 
accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to
calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

The investigators worked in teams of three. Five of the six Iraqi 
interviewers were doctors and all six were fluent in English and Arabic.

In the households reporting deaths, the person who died had to be living 
there at the time of the death and for more than two months before to be 
counted. In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the interviewers asked for 
death certificates in 78 households and were provided them 63 times.

There were 46 deaths in the surveyed households before the war. After the 
invasion, there were 142 deaths. That is an increase from 5 deaths per 1,000 
people per year to 12.3 per 1,000 people per year more than double.

However, more than a third of the post-invasion deaths were reported in one 
cluster of households in the city Fallujah,

Where fighting has been most intense recently. Because the fighting was so 
severe there, the numbers from that location may have exaggerated the 
overall picture.

When the researchers recalculated the effect of the war without the 
statistics from Fallujah, the deaths end up at 7.9 per 1,000 people per year 
still 1.5 times higher than before the war.

Even with Fallujah factored out, the survey "indicates that the death toll 
associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is more likely than not 
about 100,000 people, and may be much higher," the report said.

The most common causes of death before the invasion of Iraq were heart 
attacks, strokes and other chronic diseases. However, after the invasion, 
violence was recorded as the primary cause of death and was mainly 
attributed to coalition forces with about 95 percent of those deaths caused 
by bombs or fire from helicopter gunships.

Violent deaths defined as those brought about by the intentional act of 
others were reported in 15 of the 33 clusters. The chances of a violent 
death were 58 times higher after the invasion than before it, the 
researchers said.

Twelve of the 73 violent deaths were not attributed to coalition forces. The 
researchers said 28 children were killed by coalition forces in the survey 
households. Infant mortality rose from 29 deaths per 1,000 live births 
before the war to 57 deaths per 1,000 afterward.

The researchers estimated the nationwide death toll due to the conflict by 
subtracting the preinvasion death rate from the post-invasion death rate and 
multiplying that number by the estimated population of Iraq 24.4 million at 
the start of the war. Then that number was converted to a total number of 
deaths by dividing by 1,000 and adjusting for the 18 months since the 
invasion.

"We estimate that there were 98,000 extra deaths during the postwar period 
in the 97 percent of Iraq represented by all the clusters except Fallujah," 
the researchers said in the journal.

"This isn't about individual soldiers doing bad things. This appears to be a 
problem with the approach to occupation in Iraq," Roberts said.

The researchers called for further confirmation by an independent body such 
as the International Committee of the Red Cross, or the World Health 
Organization.

The study was funded by the Center for International Emergency Disaster and 
Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins University and by the Small Arms Survey in 
Geneva, Switzerland, a research project based at the Graduate Institute of 
International Studies in Geneva.