Lancet Survey says 600,000 have died in Iraq war

Lancet Survey says 600,000 have died in Iraq war
By Clive Cookson, Science Editor, and Steve Negus, Iraq Correspondent
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: October 11 2006 17:37 | Last updated: October 11 2006 17:37


Conflict in Iraq has killed more than 600,000 people since the US-led invasion in March 2003, according to a controversial study published online on Wednesday by The Lancet, a leading medical journal. The researchers said their figure, far higher than any previous estimate, was more accurate than the death tolls produced by official Iraqi sources.

Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, carried out the survey with doctors from al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, interviewing a random sample of households throughout Iraq. They concluded that there were 655,000 “excess deaths” as a result of the war, equivalent to 2.5 per cent of the pop ulation; 601,000 died through violence, usually gunfire.

The researchers had in 2004 already published an estimate of almost 100,000 excess deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion, using a similar technique.

In response to the controversy provoked by the first study, Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, wrote in a commentary accompanying the new paper: “It is worth emphasising the quality of this latest report, as judged by four expert peers who provided detailed comments to editors.”

Dr Horton said the findings “corroborate the imp ression that Iraq is descending into bloodthirsty chaos”.

George W. Bush, US president, rejected the survey saying its methodology had been “pretty well discredited”. “I don’t consider this a credible report. Neither does General Casey [the US commander in Iraq] and neither do Iraqi officials,” he said.

The study used two medically qualified teams, each consisting of two male and two female interviewers. They surveyed 1,849 households in 47 randomly selected sites across Iraq between May and July this year, asking about births, deaths and migration in and out of the area. A death certificate was available to confirm 92 per cent of the 629 reported deaths.

The mortality rate more than doubled, from a pre-invasion baseline of 5.5 per 1,000 people per year to 13.3 per cent per 1,000 people per year after the invasion. The violence is worst in a belt across the centre of Iraq, in the provinces just north of Baghdad. The least dangerous places to live are in the south-east and north-east.

“Our total estimate is much higher than other mortality estimates because we used a population-based, active method for collecting mortality information rather than passive methods that depend on counting bodies or tabulated media reports of violent deaths,” said Dr Burnham.

The widely quoted Iraq Body Count, an independent estimate, gives a death toll since the invasion of about 50,000. No other mortality study anywhere near as comprehensive as the Lancet survey has been published, largely because of the difficulties of gathering accurate information in a country beset with armed groups and fearful of outsiders.

The researchers acknowledged that security concerns had affected the gathering of data and said the survey teams were allowed to choose alternative sites if they judged that the original, randomly selected ones were too dangerous.

However, the Lancet paper did not explain in detail how the researchers could have visited 47 sites around the country during three months when sectarian violence was at its height. During the survey period Iraqis curtailed travel to many areas for fear of checkpoints run by militias or insurgents.

The paper does not say how armed groups in areas in question reacted to visits by outsiders gathering data. Iraqi journalists working in insurgent strongholds say that militants often take a close interest in any reporting from their districts and sometimes allow only selected reporters to gather information.