Comments on: Talking rubbish about epidemiology

By: Democracy For Geauga County - Casualties of War

Democracy For Geauga County - Casualties of War — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 21:17:16 +0000

[...] Talking Rubbish about epidemiology [...]

By: The Poor Man » Creative Accounting

The Poor Man » Creative Accounting — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 22:25:30 +0000

[...] aps. Now add in the Iraqi civilians killed – estimated, with almost complete uncertainty, to be in the range of 100,000. And now consider the maimed. And the cost [...]

By: Heiko

Heiko — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 16:33:00 +0000

Hi Mona and Donald, I am not sure whether you are still following this thread. I’ve been away on business for a little while. I think the issue of sources is important for both your responses. The Lancet is a medical journal, which gives anything published in it an instant air of credibility. However, I’ve never heard of a single instance where an author could dictate the date of publication to a scientific journal with the express purpose of influencing an election, and insist on a peer review and publication process condensed down to a fraction of what is usually done. THAT heavily undercuts the credibility of the study (because it is a scientific journal, I’d still tend to believe that they misrepresent their facts, as opposed to outright making it all up). I did find the Knight Ridder story in my google search and dismissed it as not credible. There is no independent confirmation of any of the salient facts claimed in it. In fact, far from confirming the Knight Ridder story the actual data reported in the Lancet undermine it and agree with my own estimates. If you go and have a look at the study, which is available for free download after all, you’ll find that while their estimate for extra deaths excludes Fallujah, they INCLUDE Fallujah for the following statement: “Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.” Excluding Fallujah, in fact their data nicely confirm my own estimates. The raw data (violent fatalities) for Fallujah are: 28 children 38 men 5 women The ratio of child deaths to those of women in Fallujah is hard to explain, except when you suppose that they are actually made up. For the rest of the country, we have: 4 children 13 men 2 women 2 elderly Have a look at: http://obsidianorder.blogspot.com/ “Conclusion: Based on the data in the study, we can reasonably estimate (in other words guess) that 23000 +- 9000 combatants and 7000 +- 9000 non-combatant civilians were killed by coalition military forces. This is comparable to other estimates, within the large margin of error.” That’s the Lancet study.

By: Heiko

Heiko — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 16:30:11 +0000

By: Jason G. Williscroft

Jason G. Williscroft — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 23:16:42 +0000

Regarding Putting Civilian Deaths in Perspective, a couple of you have pointed out the significance of the child nutrition data. You aren't the first! Those of you who read my article certainly noticed that I got most of my Saddam-era death data from this State Department source. I'm sure it's incomplete--we've had plenty of time to dig around on the ground in Iraq since then. Finding data on recent child malnutrition deaths, though, is an exercise in frustration. You can read all about it (and witness a no-holds-barred brawl with the smuggest eyes-wide-shut uber-liberal you've ever met) in this post and the follow-up. Here's the bottom line: as of this past September, all of the strident reports about kids dying of hunger in Iraq were based on data collected by Unicef in 2002, when Saddam was still in power. The numbers are usually reported as if they were counted last week... but it just isn't so. I can offer lots of reasons why this might be so, but the one I keep coming back to is that the people doing the counting (and the reporting) have some vested interest in having a sad story to tell. Go figure.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:54:08 +0000

The important thing as far as I’m concerned is the position of zero in the confidence interval Zero? Why zero. For there to be no effect, the confidence interval will contain 1. IIRC, when the CI contains 1 then it is usually viewed that there is no impact on relative risk for whatever phenomenon you are studying.

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 20:57:41 +0000

Heiko, after a search of about ten minutes, I found the news story I mentioned. It wasn’t the AP. It was a Knight Ridder story by Nancy Youssef that came out on September 25, 2004, where Knight Ridder claims to have an exclusive—the data compiled by the Iraqi Ministry of Health about civilian deaths. The number from April 5 to Sept 19 is 3487 deaths—they admit it is an incomplete number. They attribute two thirds of these deaths to actions taken by the US and its Iraqi allies, and one third to the insurgents. The number is much lower than what I’d imagine is the true figure if the Lancet 100,000 figure were correct—then you’d expect in the low tens of thousands. So the number for April through September is probably somewhere between 3500 and maybe 20,000. I have trouble believing that 80 percent of the deaths are going unreported, but don’t know. I don’t have any trouble believing that we’re doing two-thirds of the killing, because naturally we’re going to hear the most about the killing done by the terrorists. I’ve noticed news stories where hundreds of insurgents are reported killed by US forces and miraculously, it doesn’t appear that any civilians were among their number. I think Vietnam was like that.

By: mona

mona — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 18:36:24 +0000

heiko, sorry I’m not too inclined in rehashing all the arguments about the war, but on the subject of where I prefer to get information from, I think blogs, including Iraqi ones, can be great for commentary and opinions, and cousins are great for family news and gossip, and first hand experience is certainly great for, well, first hand experience, but my point was rather obviously and simply that a news organisation, whatever its size, or, as in this case, a medical journal, have a full set of editorial and professional rules and standards, as well as legal responsibilities that cousins and blogs alike don’t have. I’m not counting in the “mainstream media” category the kind of tabloids that encourage people to believe a pedophile is round every corner or that aliens might have landed at Roswell. That a study is published in a journal like Lancet doesn’t mean it’s automatically The Truth, also because it’s not about truths but estimates, but it carries more authority and uses more rigorous methods than the ideological complaints of some ambitious instapundits who never even set foot in Iraq. That’s all. Also, there has been no major terrorist attack in the US over the last 3 years. How does that square with supposedly being less safe after the removal of Saddam? I don’t know, I’m not in the US. Good for you, by all means. We just don’t know that no terrorist attacks in the US after 9/11 is a side effect of Saddam being gone. People in Madrid, or even, gosh, Iraq!, might not feel so safe, and the correlation with the war in Iraq there does seem a bit stronger. So, it just depends where you’re sitting. I thought we were discussing Iraqi casualties, terrorists in Iraq, the effects of the war on those Iraqis we all care so much about, right? But thanks for clarifying your priorities.

By: mona

mona — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 18:09:51 +0000

In all honesty, the Pentagon’s “Not doing body counts” has less to do with any agenda than with the fact that counting bodies is dangerous work, as the Johns Hopkins researchers found out Ah yes, priorities! I was thinking of a comparison with NATO bombings over Yugoslavia and Kosovo, while no official figures were given on that either, NATO spokespeople did ‘confirm’ the estimates published by human rights organisations Of course those numbers were a lot lower, in the hundreds rather than thousands.

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 18:09:28 +0000

Heiko, I’ll concede that that quote can be read as “the threat is not imminent, but we must act.” Given the immediately following sentence, I would say that it can also be read as “we have no way of knowing whether the threat is imminent or not, so we must act.” But that’s a minor point that I’m more than happy to concede. Your claim was not, in fact, bullshit, and I was hasty in labelling it as such. On the other hand, the claim that Iraq under Saddam posed a “threat” to the security United States—imminent, emergent, or any other kind—is bullshit of the highest order. The weapons that we were told were there, were in fact not there. Period. Everything else is grasping at straws. If you want to argue that we invaded Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people, then do so. But you also need to take into account that the people of this country were led into war under false pretenses.

By: Heiko

Heiko — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 17:58:18 +0000

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.”

By: Heiko

Heiko — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 17:49:49 +0000

http://obsidianorder.blogspot.com/ Any comments?

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 17:48:33 +0000

President Bush explicitly stated that Saddam did not represent an imminent threat, but needed to be dealt with before he became one. Show me the “explicit” quotation in which Bush said “Saddam does not represent an imminent threat.” Otherwise, that’s utter bullshit.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 16:02:02 +0000

Donald: the reason I didn’t find myself grouching at your use of extrapolation is that it wasn’t in a headline or executive summary and was fairly clearly flagged for what it was; an illustrative number and a reality check on the calculations. I only really dislike extrapolated numbers when they’re presented as The Truth.

By: Heiko

Heiko — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 14:43:26 +0000

Hi Donald, there is nothing on the website of the Iraqi Ministry of Health: http://www.mohiraq.org/ A google search throws up nothing reliable either.