Death toll calculation method 'correct

Dubai: The author of a report that put the Iraqi post-invasion death toll at 655,00 has told Gulf News that the method of calculation was "tried and trusted'' and despite criticism from President George W. Bush was even used by the US government.

"We're very confident with the findings,'' Professor Gilbert Burnham from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, said.

"This method has been around. It's a tried and trusted system. The US government has used it to find out such things as how many people take sufficient vitamin A and other statistics. It has also been used in conflict zones such as Serbia and Kosovo.''

The research methods involved house-to-house surveys by teams of doctors across random sites in Iraq with the findings then extrapolated across the country.

Since the report was published last week in The Lancet, a British medical journal, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have been quick to try to discredit it. Both Tony Blair and Bush have questioned its accuracy. "Our figure was an average. It could be 655,000, it could be 500,000. The point is that the death toll is high,'' Burnham said.

Nearly a third of the deaths (31 per cent) were ascribed to the coalition forces. Most of the deaths 601,000 out of 655,000 were due to violence and of those, 56 per cent were caused by gunshot wounds. Air strikes, car bombs and other explosions accounted for a further 13-14 per cent.

Other organisations, including the Brooking Index, relying on the United Nations (which gets figures from the Iraqi health ministry) and the Iraq Body Count (IBC), estimate the civilian death toll at about 62,000, less than a tenth of Burnham's figure.

However, their estimates are compiled from media accounts of deaths. Because of the dire situation in Iraq there is a belief that the media have under-reported the scale of fatalities.

IBC puts the toll between 43,850 and 48,693, though it adds that "our maximum refers to reported deaths which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media''.

Not surprisingly, Burnham's findings have come under heavy fire from within the United States.

"Some people cannot understand how you can calculate death without seeing the dead bodies,'' Burnham said.

"We calculate that about 2.5 per cent [one in 40] of the Iraqi population has died. In Vietnam it was about 10 per cent and East Timor, throughout the entire conflict it was more than 20 per cent.''

The inference clearly being that even at 655,000 the death toll is not that different from past conflicts. "Most of the deaths have been adult males and we believe that there will be consequences for the country in generations to come.''

FATALITIES
Report indicates at least three-fold rise

The Lancet report indicates that if someone went to five or six places picked at random in Iraq, and went to the graveyards for those villages or communities, they could see that there are three or four times more bodies being brought in per week compared to 2002, the year before the invasion. This was also a year of high death tolls because of the crippling effect of a decade of UN sanctions.

Likewise, if someone went to any community, then on average, about 70 per cent of the deaths would be due to violence, if The Lancet report is correct.

The report indicates the entire country is being convulsed by violence and not just the vicinity of Baghdad. The difficulty of course is that the media is incapable of getting around to carry out such a survey safely.