655,000 Iraqis died due to invasion: study

[janbo1960]

US researchers estimate that 655,000 Iraqis, or around one in 40 of the Iraq population, have died as a result of the 2003 invasion of their country, according to a study to be published on Thursday by the British journal The Lancet.

In October 2004, a paper also published in The Lancet calculated that almost 100,000 deaths had occurred in Iraq between March 2003 and September 2004 as a result of violence and heart attack and aggravated health problems.

Updating this, a team led by Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, sought to make an estimate of deaths in the post-invasion period from March 2003 to June 2006, and compared the mortality before the invasion, from January 2002 to January 2003.

They randomly selected 47 sites across Iraq, comprising 1,849 households and 12,801 people.

Interviewers asked householders about births, deaths and migration and if there had been a death since January 2002 and, if so, asked to see a death certificate to note the cause.

Of the 629 deaths recorded, 547, or 87 per cent, were in the post-invasion period.

Extrapolated across the country, 654,965 premature deaths - 2.5 per cent of the population - have occurred since March 2003, the study says.

Around 601,000 were due to violence; around half of the deaths in this category were due to gunfire.

"The number of people dying in Iraq has continued to escalate. The proportion of deaths ascribed to coalition forces has diminished in 2006, although the actual numbers have increased every year," the study says.

"Gunfire remains the most common cause of death, although deaths from car bombing have increased."

The study acknowledges weaknesses in its data collection, saying that the "extreme insecurity" during the survey limited the number of teams that ventured out to interview families and the time they could spend interviewing.

"Calling back to households not available on the initial visit was felt to be too dangerous," it adds.

But there was also the possibility that some deaths may have gone unrecorded, it says.

"Families, especially in households with combatants killed, could have hidden deaths. Under-reporting of infant deaths is a widespread concern in surveys of this type. Entire households could have been killed, leading to survivor bias."

The authors describe the Iraq conflict as a humanitarian emergency that required an independent body to assess the high mortality.

"Although such death rates might be common in times of war, the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century," it says.

The study is published online by The Lancet.

The 2004 study, lead-authored by Les Roberts, also of Johns Hopkins, suggested the risk of death in post-invasion Iraq was 250 per cent higher than before the invasion.


Maybe Oliver Stone will make a movie about this!!!

[faceless]

[janbo1960]