Lancet versus Iraq/WHO

The NE Journal of Medicine's article showing results from a joint study by the health ministry of Iraq and the World Health Organization, includes the following:

Mortality from nonviolent causes was significantly higher per 1000 person-years in the post-invasion period (4.92; 95% CI, 4.49 to 5.41) than in the pre-invasion period (3.07; 95% CI, 2.61 to 3.63)

A great deal is being made of the difference between the reported deaths by violence in the two studies. However, note that the Iraq/WHO study concludes that there has been a roughly 60% increase in the non-violent mortality rate. The Lancet article reported a rather small rise. If you compare total "excess deaths," and figure that the extra 1.85 deaths per thousand in a population of 27 million comes to essentially 150,000, you have the new study showing 300,000 excess deaths in three years, compared with the Lancet's 655,000. Lancet calculated a wide confidence range and, when you add the error range of Iraq/WHO, they probably overlap.

A couple of interesting points. If Iraq/WHO is to be believed, their respondents provided evidence of 100,000 more non-violent deaths than did those of the Lancet study. The participation of the ministry of health, which among other things forbade its morgues from revealing the number of bodies they were receiving, is a little suspect. It wouldn't be surprising that their employees would return from the field and report more deaths as non-violent. It also wouldn't surprise me if a few deaths were "lost," although I have no evidence for that.

Second, suppose that it was Lancet in 2006 that had reported 151,000 excess violent deaths and 300,000 excess total deaths. What would have been the response from the Right? Ridicule, of course. Now they have numbers that are more palatable than Lancet's and they embrace them, without mentioning that the new numbers are wildly worse than the estimates made by either President Bush or Iraq Body Count. A reasonable summary would say that by now, in early 2008, some half million to one million more Iraqis have died than if we had not invaded in 2003.

In closing, however, I can't say that I personally lose sleep over Iraqis dying. The CIA World Fact Book on Iraq gives a 2007 estimate of 2.6% annual population growth. In the midst of this war, the average Iraqi woman is giving birth to four babies. Evidently, procreation remains the Iraqi national pastime, and without our assistance in elevating their death rate, they would even sooner reach the saturation point of their land and experience a mass die off. With our help, that day of reckoning has been slightly postponed.

I still don't think it's worth a trillion dollars.