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Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Don't Trust Snakes smell test

The death toll in Iraq following the US-led invasion has topped 655,000 - one in 40 of the entire population - according to a major piece of research in one of the world's leading medical journals . . . .

. . . . Nearly a third of the deaths (31%) were ascribed to the coalition forces. Most of the deaths - 601,000 out of 655,000 - were due to violence and of those, 56% were caused by gunshot wounds. Air strikes, car bombs and other explosions accounted for a further 13-14%. - The Guardian, October 12, 2006
Does it really seem plausible that more than one percent of the Iraqi population has died of gunshot wounds since the U.S. invasion? More than 330,000 people SHOT DEAD? That seems absurdly high to me. (There were about 58,000 U.S. deaths and 350,000 U.S. casualties in Vietnam.) Did they all get shot in the head? If not, you'd think there ought to be at least 330,000 people who survived gunshots during the same period. Could Iraqi hospital or clinic records support such a figure? I doubt it.

Further details:
The new number comes from a survey of 1,849 households in 16 regions of Iraq. Teams of questioners organised by the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad asked people about household members that had died between January 2002, before the invasion, up to July 2006. They documented 82 deaths in the period before the invasion, and 547 during the conflict.

An extrapolation of this data suggests that the number of deaths per thousand people per year has leapt from 5.5 to 13.3 over that period. Across the whole country, say the researchers, that figure equates to a total of 654,965 more deaths than would have been expected from pre-invasion rates. Just over 600,000 of those were caused by direct violence, the team adds. - Nature.com, October 11, 2006


posted at 11:15 PM

1 Comments:

Blogger tp_gal said...

I've never been a huge fan of 'extrapolation' statistics. I surveyed three of my co-workers and two think my boss is jerk. There are 60,000 people in our company; therefore 40,000 people think my boss is a jerk.

I know it's not quite that unscientific, but it's close.

October 14, 2006 7:12 AM  

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