Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000

Washington Post A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government. It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

2 comments:

pimp-a-lot bear said...

that's a lot more!

cybrbeast said...

Pretty fucked up, that's 2.5% of the population. I wonder if it's correct, especially if you consider the other reports. I hope other people try to verify their results.
This was a household survey so they asked households about the number of deaths in that household after the invasion. Seems pretty reliable.
They went to 50 randomly chosen places and asked 40 households at each place to divulge information. The households consisted of a total of 12801 indivuduals.

Also note the number of deaths is
655,000, with a 95% Confidence Interval between 392,979 - 942,636

Read the complete research paper here