LancetIraq
tlambert | April 28, 2006The BBC has a report on the dispute between the IBC and Media Lens about Iraqi casualties. (My previous post on this is here.) IBC's John Sloboda trots out Kaplan's fallacy:
Some critics of the Lancet study have said it's like a drunk throwing a dart at a dartboard. It's going to go somewhere, but who knows if that number is the bulls eye.
Unfortunately many many people have decided to accept that that 98,000 figure is the truth - or the best approximation to the truth that we have.
Yes, some critics have said that, but not ones that are experts in statistics.
Sloboda says:
We've always said…
tlambert | April 10, 2006One of the features of the generally shoddy reporting of Iraqi casualties in the media is the way that if reporters mention the Lancet study they will mention the bogus controversy about it, while the Iraq Body Count number is never given any qualifications, even though it is guaranteed to be too low. The IBC people are at least partly responsible for this presenting a maximum number for deaths, even though the actual number is certainly more than their maximum. Media Lens has
more criticism, including these interesting comments:
One of the world's leading professional epidemiologists, who…
tlambert | April 4, 2006
Blogger dav wrote to RTE (Ireland's Public Service Broadcaster) to correct their misleading reporting of Iraqi casualties:
Today's Six One news reports that the death toll in Iraq as a result of invasion is estimated at between 34 and 38 thousand. Presumably these figures were obtained from the organisation IraqBodyCount. However they are arrived at by recording only the deaths reported by English language news sources. Therefore it can in no way be considered to reflect a conclusive account of Iraqi deaths caused or resulting from the continuing war.
In future, if you are reporting the…
tlambert | April 1, 2006Nicholas Davies has an article Estimating civilian deaths in Iraq - six surveys in Online Journal. Critics often point to the Iraq Body Count and the Iraq living conditions survey as contradicting the Lancet study when they do not. Davies explains why.
tlambert | March 29, 2006A misleading sidebar on this BBC story on Iraq only presents the IBC count of civilians killed in Iraq (which is guaranteed to be a significant undercount) and omits to mention the Lancet estimate of roughly 100,000 excess deaths.
Gabriele Zamparini wrote to the BBC seeking an explanation. The BBC's Steve Hermann tries to justify it:
The Lancet study is a snapshot taken more than 18 months ago and though the methodology has been widely acknowledged as standard, there has been argument about whether the sampling method is the most appropriate for this kind of survey.
Alas, it's another…
tlambert | March 16, 2006Note for visitors from Daily Kos: 120,000 is an estimate of the
number of violent deaths. The total number of extra deaths as a result of the war is very roughly
200,000 once you include the increase in disease and accidents since
the invasion. This number is more likely to be too low than too high since it comes from doubling the 100,000 estimate from the Lancet study (which just covered the first eighteen months) and violence has worsened since then.
Jim Krane reports:
Three years into the war, one grim measure of its impact on Iraqis can be seen at Baghdad's morgue: There, the staff…
tlambert | January 16, 2006I missed this when it first came out, but Carl Bialik has written excellent summary of the issues in the Wall Street Journal.
Researchers concluded that about 100,000 more Iraqis had died outside Fallujah since the invasion than would have died had the prewar death rate continued. Yet the study, published in the British medical journal Lancet, was roundly criticized for discarding the Fallujah data from calculations. Others questioned the study for extrapolating from only 89 death reports outside Fallujah, including reports of 21 violent deaths.
The biggest concern with the Lancet study…
tlambert | January 11, 2006Michael Schwartz writes about the rules of engagement in Iraq:
A little over a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins researchers reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence by the U.S. and its allies. The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating that 1.7 million people had died in the Congo in 2000. Though the…
tlambert | January 9, 2006Andrew Cockburn reports on an analysis of the raw Lancet data by Pierre Sprey who used a non-parametric method (so it was not necessary to exclude Falluja) and found:
"So, applying that simple notion to the death rates before and after the US invasion of Iraq, we find that the confidence intervals around the estimated 100,000 "excess deaths" not only shrink considerably but also that the numbers move significantly higher. With a distribution-free approach, a 95 per cent confidence interval thereby becomes 53,000 to 279,000. (Recall that the Gaussian approach gave a 95 per cent confidence…
tlambert | January 6, 2006John Allen Paulos writes about Iraqi war deaths:
Another figure in the news recently has been the number of Iraqis killed in the war. President Bush mentioned last month that in addition to the more than 2,100 American soldiers killed so far in Iraq, that there were approximately 30,000 Iraqis killed. He was likely referring to the approximate figure put out by Iraq Body Count, a group of primarily British researchers who use online Western media reports to compile an extensive list of Iraqi civilians killed. The organization checks the names and associated details of those killed. It…
tlambert | December 20, 2005The Washington Post continues its sorry record on the Lancet study with this piece by Sarah Sewall:
The Lancet study relied on a door-to-door survey of Iraqi households in 33 neighborhoods. The surveyors asked for details of deaths in the months before and after the invasion and found a significantly higher death rate after. But the approach was flawed. War is not like a pandemic; it comes in pockets. And the study itself qualified its conclusions, acknowledging that the figure could range enormously between 8,000 and 194,000.
Sewall fails to present any argument, any argument at all, why…
tlambert | December 19, 2005David Kane asked Les Roberts for the data for the Lancet study. He CC'd it to me, so
here it is.
tlambert | December 15, 2005Democracy Now has an interview with Les Roberts about his survey. Roberts comments on Bush answering a question about Iraqi deaths:
I guess, politically, he has to downplay this issue, but for him to say a number, that of the eight estimates out there is probably the lowest one, really is not a strategic thing to do in terms of winning hearts and minds in Iraq. Secondly, I'm even more struck that here a year after our study came out, the first time the President has been asked about this was not by a reporter, but by someone from the public when he took a question.
Regular readers will be…
tlambert | December 14, 2005Peter Baker in the Washington Post writes:
The Iraqi death toll has been the subject of considerable debate. A group of British researchers and antiwar activists called Iraq Body Count estimates civilian casualties between 27,383 and 30,892, not counting Iraqi troops or insurgents, by tabulating incidents reported in media and human rights reports. Iraqi authorities have said that roughly 800 people die a month in violence there, a rate that if typical over the course of the conflict would come to 25,600.
An epidemiological study published in the British journal the Lancet last year estimated…
tlambert | December 13, 2005The Sydney Morning Herald reports
Asked about the Iraqi death toll, Bush said about 30,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
It was the first time Bush has publicly offered such an estimate. His aides quickly pointed out the president was not offering an official estimate.
"There is not an official US government estimate," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. He said the 30,000 figure was based on "public estimates cited by media reports."
Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich demanded the Bush administration release all information it has…
tlambert | November 18, 2005Monbiot's article on the Lancet study drew this letter from Gil Elliot:
On the strength of having calculated war deaths around the globe over the past century, I can inform George Monbiot (The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq, November 8) that the Lancet report on Iraqi deaths is deeply flawed. The number of deaths uncovered by the fieldwork, excluding Falluja, was 21; this figure is extrapolated to a population of 20 million to arrive at the calculation of 100,000 deaths. No one who understands the battlefield would accept such a figure based on 21 bodies. Since most of…
tlambert | November 9, 2005George Monbiot blasts the pathetic media for their lazy and incompetent reporting of deaths in Iraq
Hitchens Watch catches Christopher Hitchens citing the Lancet study of deaths in Darfur as a "reliable estimate" after calling the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq a "crazed fabrication".
tlambert | November 7, 2005Lenin points to some complete innumeracy at the BBC as they make excuses for not using the Lancet estimate. They write:
We do not usually use the Lancet's figure in standard news stories
because it is so far out of line with other studies on the same issue.
There are also some questions over the validity of the Lancet study in
the case of measuring casualties in Iraq. The technique of sampling and
extrapolating from samples has been criticised in this case because the
pattern of violence in Iraq has been so uneven.
Of course, it isn't far out of line with other studies---it agrees quite well…
tlambert | November 1, 2005This American Life has a fascinating show on the Lancet study and why the news coverage of it was so pathetic. Worth listening to.
In it, another Lancet critic, Marc Garlasco recants:
I'm not a statistician---I know absolutely nothing about it. When I then went and spoke to statisticians they said: "the method he is using is a really accurate one. This is something that we use in studies all throughout the world and it is a generally accepted model."