Lancet report: was the pre-war death rate assumption too low?
- 16 Oct 06, 01:57 PM
A number of commentators have questioned one key assumption in the Johns Hopkins/Lancet report: the pre-war death rate of 5.5 per thousand. If the pre-war death rate had been higher, the difference with the post war finding (13.3) would have been smaller and the number presumed killed as a result of the conflict lower....
...In the report the researchers claim this finding tallies with pre-war assumptions by the CIA and the US Census Bureau. However people have been writing in to ask 鈥渨hat about all those children killed by sanctions before the war鈥 and pointing to significantly higher death rates in other medium-developed countries. Here鈥檚 a summary of what I鈥檝e been able to find out:
A query of the US Census Bureau stats for the year 2002 suggested a pre-war death rate of 6.02. Do it yourself .
A 2003 version of the Iraq page on the CIA World Factbook suggests a death rate of 5.84. See it :
I could not find the WHO estimate of 7.6 referred to . Can anybody help with that?
One indicator as to whether an upsurge in violent death is plausible as a result of the conflict would be what happened last time. This article by MH Wahdan, on the epidemiology of the Middle East, contains some interesting stats. Notably that the crude death rate for the entire region fell dramatically from over 17 per 1000 to 9.1 per 1000 between the early 1970s and 1995. But that after Desert Storm and the crushing of the Nawroz uprisings in Kurdistan and the Shia south, the death rate in Iraq shot up. It states:
鈥淚n Iraq, Ministry of Health statistics show a significant reversal in the epidemiological transition during the 1990s. The total number of deaths has increased almost fourfold from 1990 to 1993 (Figure 1). This reversal is more evident in the under-five mortalities, which increased by a factor of more than 5 during the period from 1990 to 1993 (Figure 2). If data were available, we should see the same pattern or worse in Afghanistan and Somalia. The same is expected in other countries affected by man-made disasters, especially wars.鈥
The figure shows Iraq total death rates rising to 120,000 a year following the conflict. That is still much less than the 150,000 excess violent deaths estimated by the Johns Hopkins team 鈥 but the situation then was different.
For those who can鈥檛 remember way back then, it is worth remembering the fate of the hapless US Commerce's Census Bureau of Foreign Countries statistician who released the estimate of 158,000 deaths as the result of Desert Storm, including 40,000 Iraqi military casualties and 30,000 civilians killed in the uprisings: she was . Read about her battle for reinstatement, and alleged mysterious goings on at the office .
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This was interesting.
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I'm with you, but having some trouble following some links, notably to US Census and Wahdan.
Keep up your high standards of journalism.
Regards
ed
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Lancet-Iraq Deaths
If pre-invasion Iraq had a death rate of 5.84 per thousand of population( stats. fron CIA World Fact Book), this is per annum, correct?. Doesn't this mean that they lived to 160+ years on average? Britian has a death rate of 10.21 per thousand, people in Iraq lived longer under Saddam and Sanctions than in Britain? (No wonder I failed A level maths in 1980)
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