LancetIraq
tlambert | December 2, 2004 Medact, a UK health charity has a new study on the effects of the war on health and the health system in Iraq. Some extracts:
A recent scientific study has suggested that upwards of 100,000 Iraqis may have died since the 2003 coalition invasion, mostly from violence, mainly air strikes by coalition forces. Most of those reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. Many thousands of conflict-related injuries were also sustained. Infant mortality has risen because of lack of access to skilled help in childbirth, as well as because of…
tlambert | December 1, 2004 Just when you thought you had seen all the different possible attacks on the Lancet study, Helle Dale, writing in the Washington Times, comes up with a new one: the study's authors are having second thoughts. Dale writes
As the Financial Times reported on Nov. 19, even the Lancet study's authors are now having second thoughts. Iraq's Health Ministry estimates by comparison that all told, 3,853 Iraqis have been killed and 155,167 wounded.
Gee, did the Financial Times really report that the authors were having second thoughts? Let's check. The report (…
tlambert | November 30, 2004 Yes, he's back! Over at his website Fumento has posted Hate Mail, Volume 32, which contains his creatively edited version of our exchange. According to Fumento, it went like this:
Fumento:
And no, the Lancet column I wrote didn't just appear in the four papers you mentioned. It appears in places you don't even know about because, unlike your blog, it isn't confined to the web but also appears in print. Yesterday it was in the Washington Times print edition. But if only the web interests you, you should know it was picked up by the entire McClatchy News Service. That means that…
tlambert | November 27, 2004 The latest pundit to attack the Lancet study is somebody called John Lott. He writes:
I haven't spent a lot of time going through the methodology used in this survey by Lancet, but I don't know how one could assume that those surveyed couldn't have lied to create a false impression. After all, some do have a strong political motive.
Well, unlike surveys of defensive guns use, where the people questioned can make anything up that they liked, the researchers tried to verify the deaths with death certificates and were successful in 81% of the…
tlambert | November 26, 2004 I haven't commented on Kaplan's shoddy critique of the Lancet because Daniel Davies already demolished it here. Kaplan did have one argument that Davies did not address, so I will deal with that in this post. Kaplan wrote:
The survey team simply could not visit some of the randomly chosen clusters; the roads were blocked off, in some cases by coalition checkpoints. So the team picked other, more accessible areas that had received similar amounts of damage. But it's unclear how they made this calculation. In any case, the detour destroyed the survey's…
tlambert | November 25, 2004David Adesnik has replied to my post on malnutrition in Iraq. He has conceded that the Washington Post was reporting the results of a new survey rather than the results of one from 2003. But he is still arguing that the war did not cause the increase in malnutrition seen in the 2003 study:
The question isn't whether a certain child had some diarrhoea during the invasion, but whether that child started to have diarrhoea (or whether the condition intensified) during that five week period.
If we look at this UNICEF press release (which Adesnik…
tlambert | November 25, 2004 One of the arguments made against the Lancet study was that the study had greatly underestimated the pre-war mortality rate, because the study found that it was about 29 per 1000 live births, while UNICEF estimated that it was 108. Now the 108 dates from 1999, but sceptics doubted that it could have declined dramatically by 2002. However, other studies (see table below) show that the incidence of acute malnutrition declined dramatically between the late 90s and 2002, so it seems likely that infant mortality would have done so as well…
tlambert | November 22, 2004 Chris Bertram points out that a new study suggests that the Lancet's finding of an increase in infant mortality following the invasion of Iraq is correct. The Washington Post reports:
After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program....
International aid efforts and the U.N. oil-for-food…
tlambert | November 20, 2004 The latest pundit to have a go at the Lancet study is Andrew Bolt. Like most of the critics, Bolt just does not have the statistical background to produce a competent critique. In Bolt's case this is even less excusable, since he had the benefit of the Economist's excellent article, but unfortunately Bolt does not seem to have understood it.
Bolt [writes](http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/dveathby.htm):
Just ask yourself: Have more than 180 Iraqis, mainly women and children, really died every day, on average, for the past 18 months, usually at the…
tlambert | November 17, 2004 Sadly, it looks as if Michael Fumento has retired from the field. All I can offer any folks suffering withdrawal symptoms is this thread. James M describes it like this:
I noticed a truly spectacular example of what I suppose is the unarmed kamikaze approach to debate carrying on in the comments boxes. Not so much being savaged by a dead sheep, as seeing someone punch themselves repeatedly in the face. It is painful to watch.
But yet, like a car wreck, you must look.
tlambert | November 15, 2004 For someone who holds blogs in contempt, Michael Fumento sure spends a lot of time posting comments to blogs. Here he is again: (Hat tip: John Fleck, now the third site on a Google search for "Michael Fumento")
My writing on the Lancet article has been Fleck's obsession for over a week, and everything he says is wrong including this latest posting. First, simple subtraction tells you in 19 percent of the households death certificates were NOT used. But that's not the equivalent of 19 percent of the deaths. If a household said a bomb killed five family…
tlambert | November 13, 2004The fun continues in this comment thread. Highlights:
Michael Fumento:
The authors claimed to have come up with one set of numbers including Falluja, another without. But strangely, they never present the "without numbers." Lambert knows this because I told him directly. Anyway, it's in the study---or rather, it's NOT in the study.
John Fleck:
A quick refresher on where the Lancet study's authors included the "without Falluja" numbers. It's in the paper's abstract. That's the thing that comes right at the beginning: "We estimate that 98,000 more deaths…
tlambert | November 12, 2004Daniel Davies has an excellent roundup of the Lancet discussion.
I've added an update to my post about Gerard Alexander's attack on the Lancet.
Chris at Mixing Memory takes down another Lancet critique, this one by John Ray.
tlambert | November 11, 2004 Fumento left a comment on my earlier post. Instead of discussing the Lancet article, he boasted how his column had been published in the on the web site of the Lake Wylie Pilot, which is a free weekly newspaper serving a town of 3,000 people. Hey, my little blog has a greater circulation than that.
Eye Doc linked to Fumento's attack on the Lancet, so I left a comment explaining what was wrong. Fumento replied:
Tim Lambert is on a personal Jihad to debunk my debunking. I did not say death certificates were not used, they were. But so was alleged personal recall. That…
tlambert | November 8, 2004 The defective refutations of the Lancet study just keep on coming. First, we have Gerard Alexander writing in the Weekly standard:
But the study's researchers were sure to survey in Falluja, far and away the most violent city in post-invasion Iraq. Falluja turned out to be such a wild statistical outlier that they offer two estimates, one with Falluja included and one with it kept out. But questions about just how representative the sample sites were go deeper than this. The researchers selected their survey sites households for such unclear…
tlambert | November 8, 2004 John Fleck commented on my exchange with Fumento here and here. He responded to Fumento's silly charge that I "occupy the pitiful place of the harmless blogger who blogs because nobody in his right mind would punish (sic) him" with:
That's of course ad hominem, something of a poor refuge in any argument. But it's worse than that. It's plain dumb in this age of Dan Rather and Little Green Footballs for a writer of Fumento's stature to expect us to think he wins the argument because his work is published in mainstream media.
Sure enough, Fleck got an email…
tlambert | November 7, 2004 One interesting feature of blogspace discussion of the Lancet study has been the comments from warbloggers, who, despite not even knowing what cluster sampling is, have been absolutely certain that the methodology of the study has been discredited. For instance, Arthur Chrenkoff admits:
I'm not a statistician
but none the less concludes that Shannon Love had demolished the study. (Daniel Davies deals with that "demolition").
Or Michael Totten at Instapundit, who is certain that the study uses very bad methodology. Bill Trippe sent him a correction:
Did…
tlambert | November 6, 2004 Yet another person has tried to refute the Lancet article. John Brignell dismisses the study just because:
A relative risk of 1.5 is not acceptable as significant.
Actually the increased risk was statistically significant. You won't find support for Brignell's claim in any conventional statistical text or paper. To support his claim he cites a book called Sorry, wrong number!. Trouble is, that book was written by.... John Brignell. Not only that, it was drafted by... John Brignell. Brignell is a crank who dismisses the entire field of modern…
tlambert | November 5, 2004 The Anchorage Daily News has published a new version of Michael Fumento's attempt to debunk the Lancet study on deaths in Iraq. How does it differ from his previous attempt? Well his key argument was that their estimate was skewed by the inclusion of the Falluja cluster. But it is perfectly clear from the report that Falluja was excluded from their estimate. Fumento knows this because he responded to my post with a comment, and he specifically asked questions about the inclusion of Falluja in the comments to his TCS article. In his new version he…
tlambert | November 3, 2004 I wrote earlier how it seems that you must fail a qualifying exam before you can write on a topic at Tech Central Station. Now the errors in Fumento's critique of the Lancet study.aren't errors in epidemiology---they seem to result from not having read the study. Indeed, in comments at TCS, Fumento seems to be asking for help to find out what it said:
You imply rather strongly that you've read the report. If so, please inform us of what the extrapolation was that DID NOT rely on the Falluja cluster. I'm waiting.
and then:
I asked the wrong question. I meant to say how…