"This week Truthdig celebrates the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and the Center for International Studies at MIT as well as The Lancet for their commitment to documenting the real number of Iraqi deaths that have resulted from the 2003 U.S. military invasion of Iraq.
The study, which was reviewed by four independent experts, estimates that over 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the start of the war. According to the Christian Science Monitor, “One of the reviewing experts noted the ‘powerful strength’ of the research methods, ‘which involved house-to-house surveys by teams of doctors across Iraq.’ ”
There is no discrediting of this methodology. I don't think there's anyone who's been involved in mortality research who thinks there's a better way to do it in unsecured areas. I have never heard of any argument in this field that says there's a better way to do it."
Richard Garfield, a public health professor at Columbia University who works closely with a number of the authors of the report says that the most striking result of the survey, to him, is its finding that 2.5 percent of Iraq's population has died as a result of the war. "You can compare that to the civil war, our bloodiest war, in which 1.4 percent of our people died and look at what that meant to the US. Like then, what these numbers are saying is that every family is being touched.
No comments:
Post a Comment