Bogus Lancet Study
Posted by Shannon Love on October 29th, 2004 (All posts by Shannon Love)
Via The Command Post comes this study published in Lancet (free reg) which purports that 100,000 Iraqi have died from violence, most of it caused by Coalition air strikes, since the invasion of Iraq. Needless to say, this study will become an article of faith in certain circles but the study is obviously bogus on its face.
First, even without reading the study, alarm bells should go off. The study purports to show civilian casualties 5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source. Most other sources put total combined civilian and military deaths from all causes at between 15,000 to 20,000. The Lancet study is a degree of magnitude higher. Why the difference?
Moreover, just rough calculations should call the figure into doubt. 100,000 deaths over roughly a year and a half equates to 183 deaths per day. Seen anything like that on the news? With that many people dying from air strikes every day we would expect to have at least one or two incidents where several hundred or even thousands of people died. Heard of anything like that? In fact, heard of any air strikes at all where more than a couple of dozen people died total?
Where did this suspicious number come from? Bad methodology.
From the summary:
Mistake One:
“A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004″
It is bad practice to use a cluster sample for a distribution known to be highly asymmetrical. Since all sources agree that violence in Iraq is highly geographically concentrated, this means a cluster sample has a very high chance of exaggerating the number of deaths. If one or two of your clusters just happen to fall in a contended area it will skew everything. In fact, the study inadvertently suggests that this happened when it points out later that:
“Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters…”
In fact, this suggest that violent deaths were not “widespread” as 18 of the 33 clusters reported zero deaths. if 54% of the clusters had no deaths then all the other deaths occurred in 46% of the clusters. If the deaths in those clusters followed a standard distribution most of the deaths would have occurred in less than 15% of the total clusters.
And bingo we see that:
“Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja”
(They also used a secondary grouping system (page 2, paragraph 3) that would cause further skewing.)
Mistake Two:
“33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002.”
Self-reporting in third-world countries is notoriously unreliable. In the guts of the paper (page 3, paragraph 2) they say they tried to get death certificates for at least two deaths for each cluster but they never say how many of the deaths, if any, they actually verified. It is probable that many of the deaths, especially the oddly high number of a deaths of children by violence, never actually occurred.
So we have a sampling method that fails for diverse distributions, at least one tremendously skewed cluster and unverified reports of deaths.
Looking at the raw data they provide doesn’t inspire any confidence whatsoever. Table 2 (page 4) shows the actual number of deaths reported. The study recorded 142 post-invasion deaths total with with 73 (51%) due to violence. Of those 73 deaths from violence, 52 occurred in Falluja. That means that all the other 21 deaths occurred in one of the 14 clusters where somebody died, or 1.5 deaths per cluster. Given what we know of the actual combat I am betting that most of the deaths occurred in three or four clusters and the rest had 1 death each. Given the low numbers of samples, one or two fabricated reports of deaths could seriously warp the entire study.
At the very end of the paper (page 7, paragraph 1) they concede that:
“We suspect that a random sample of 33 Iraqi locations is likely to encounter one or a couple of particularly devastated areas. Nonetheless, since 52 of 73 (71%) violent deaths and 53 of 142 (37%) deaths during the conflict occurred in one cluster, it is possible that by extraordinary chance, the survey mortality estimate has been skewed upward. “
Gee, you think? It’s almost as if military violence is not randomly distributed across the population of Iraq but is instead intelligently directed at specific areas, rendering a statistical extrapolation of deaths totally useless.
In the next paragraph they admit:
“Removing half the increase in infant deaths and the Falluja data still produces a 37% increase in estimated mortality.”
That puts their final numbers just above the high end of the range reported by other sources.
This “peer reviewed study” is a piece of polemical garbage. Everybody is supposed to take away the bumper sticker summary, “Coalition kills 100,000 Iraqi civilians, half of them children,” without reading the details. It tries to use crude epidemiological models like those used to study disease and applies them to the conscious infliction of violence by human beings. The result is statistical static.
(Update: Commentator Clashman below points out that the studies “conservative” estimate is actually around 66,000 instead of the 30,000 I had done in my head so the study is actually at least twice of what other sources place as the upper range at around 25,000)
(Update: Further related thoughts in )
(Update: I have posted more thoughts on evaluating the methodology of the study)
October 29th, 2004 at 6:30 pm
I am voting Bush because I can no longer tolerate stupidty.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:31 pm
Adding to the skepticism are two facts:
The lead author was an opponent of the war, and
The lead author submitted it to the Lancet on the express condition that it be published before the election.
Do you suppose the guy might have a bit of bias of his own?
October 29th, 2004 at 6:38 pm
Why does the medical profession do this to itself? People just love to trade on the good name of their profession (accumulated by someone else, I might add) to score cheap political points. Just like good leftists, always spending someone else’s money.
I just read a trade paper (I’m a shrink) where the APA is actually considering a proposal to classify “racism” as a mental disorder! It’s truly infuriating.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:40 pm
Thanks for clearing this up. Now that I know only 15,000 to 20,000 people died, I feel much better about the War. Let’s start some more.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:44 pm
Does no one remember the UN said 4000 Iraqi children five and under were dying every month before the war?
They were dying because of malnutrition and lack of medical care.
That was before the liberation.
That was because of the trade restrictions.
Right.
One might think it was because certain UN folk were doing a great job of feathering their nests.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:47 pm
Good Stuff!
Thanks for providing this information for my brain to process and make a more informed opinion of what I think about this.
I already had my doubts.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:51 pm
So its about the body count? There are lots of places we can save 1000s of lives without even shooting at anyone. Turns out to be lots cheaper too.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:52 pm
I’m sorry, but it sounds like you are contradicting yourself.
You say that deaths shouldn’t be widespread, and that “most of the deaths would have occured in less than 15% of the clusters” (less than 4 clusters).
And then you say they report that violent deaths occured in just one cluster (less than 4, certainly).
Are you saying that their use of the word widespread, when they clearly indicate the total distribution of deaths, was wrong-headed?
I take most objection to your comment that we haven’t heard reports of more deaths.
The facts are that many, many stories aren’t getting reported. Journalists aren’t told by the military to stroll around. They are told that if they leave certain areas, their lives are in their own hands.
Your wild guess of Iraqi military dead is entirely unsubstantiated.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:54 pm
When I read the news account, I had problems, many of which you stated quite well. You also raised some other issues which I should have thought of, but thank you for making them. You have hopefully made the electorate a little smarter.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:55 pm
godfodder,
It is great news that the APA is considering clasifying racism as a mental disorder. This will prevent racists from being fired from their jobs as they will now have ADA protection. Further, given the notorious lack of success in dealing with such previous mental disorders as homosexuality, racists will have no incentive to change. Szasz was right.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:57 pm
after taking classes in stats, conducting medical research, and learning about how you cannot draw conclusions on ridiculous stats, i find this report in the Lancet abominable.
if the Lancet held the same statiscal standard to drugs currently in testing, or drugs that you and i will be taking, then 50 percent of all people who take the drugs would either die or be incapacitated.
this publication has just denigrated itself by infusing such hilarious mystifying conclusions from statisitics that cannot even pass a simple logic test.
what a shame.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:00 pm
They are told that if they leave certain areas, their lives are in their own hands.
Well, duh. I here that from police when I go to North Minneapolis.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:02 pm
This story surfaced before and then and now seems tied to a web site (http://www.iraqbodycount.net/) that is part of a circuitous linkage of resources that reference each other in one large daisy chain, with each supporting the previous one’s data.
Try tracking the related sources yourself and see if its still the case.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:15 pm
Have a look at this report from UNICEF
http://www.unicef.org/newsline/99pr29.htm
To take some figures:
85% of the population in the survey
24000 households surveyed
In 1999, there were 131/000 under 5s mortality
In 1999, infant mortality (under 1 yr) was 108/000
In 1999, maternal mortality was 29/000
In the Lancet publication:
Only 800 odd households surveyed
Before war, infant mortality was 29/000
After war, infant mortality 57/000
Clearly bombing is good for the Iraqis, it halves their their infant
mortality rate.
Or you might like to think that this was a partisan puff piece put out as an
“October Surprise” for the US election. Certainly, it would be sensible to
treat it with sceptisism.
JC
October 29th, 2004 at 7:17 pm
bullhicky
October 29th, 2004 at 7:19 pm
Where the ‘100,000′ Comes From
I think we will be seeing more stories tearing this down, but Shannon Love does a pretty good job, explaining that the study used epidemiological statistical methods in which data from randomly sampled areas is extrapolated and applied to a general who…
October 29th, 2004 at 7:26 pm
Speaking as an epidemiologist, I wouldn’t even spit on this study, let alone cite it. What idiots! Not just the authors, but anyone who takes the study seriously.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:29 pm
Brice Tebbs,
15 to 20 thousand people in 16 months is less than were being killed violently by Saddam Hussein. There is no way to get rid of an established totalitarian regime by force without killing 20 to 50 thousand people. The militant core of people that benefit from the regime are not going to give up until they see enough of their comrades killed to convince them to give up.
During the civil war General Sherman reached this conclusion about the confederacy. He decided that the Union needed to kill, I believe, 200,000 confederates to get enough of the militant core of confederate leaders to end the war with a victory for the North.
Because we have invested in military technolgy such as precision bombs and air survellience. We can do this a lot more cleanly now than in past wars. But there is no way the Baathists are going without tens of thousands of deaths. It is still better for Iraq than having them in power though.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:36 pm
if 100,000 Baathists had died, I’d say we need to kill more ..
October 29th, 2004 at 7:40 pm
A few other notes about the study:
-On author bias - when discussing what could have gone wrong, they routinely mention how they could be under-estimating the rate, and rarely mention how they could be over-estimating the rate.
-Did they check their model assumptions? It looks like they dumped their data into some canned software - tends to be pretty unreliable.
-They seem to be focusing on urban areas. What about rural death rates?
-They assume an increase in death rate from the invasion. While this can also fit no increase, this does tend to make one question parts of the study - especially the confidence intervals
-The people conducting the study were scared to travel around the country. How does this affect stuff?
-Look at the chart 2/3rds of the way through with monthly death figures. Just think about it for a bit……
Plus what the original post said.
Mike
October 29th, 2004 at 7:51 pm
Gads, that study wouldn’t even rate a D if it were submitted to me as a Grad school prof. The Lancet is following Scientific American into the ranks of pseudo-science. They better learn some math — fast!!
October 29th, 2004 at 7:56 pm
Interesting analysis. Thanks for doing the work. Cliche warning - cliche warning: Statistics lie, and liars use statistics. War is hell. People are stupid.
October 29th, 2004 at 8:13 pm
The real “health problem” is the “European disease” that has been endemic over there for 2,000 years, The soul-sickness to which I refer is, of course, anti-Semiticism. Charles at LGF has a number of excellent references exposing the political agenda infecting Lancet and many other elitist publications. Sometimes the rabidly-ill disguise their sick thinking with a cosmetic application of “concern for the suffering of the Palestinians” (in the case of anti-Israel propanganda). In this case, they are using “concern for Iraq” as cover for the fact that a primary reason they hate U.S. is that it is Israel’s greatest ally.
Oh well, we had to go over and administer a strong dose of military medicine in order to cure their last outbreak of the European scourge (also called WW II). Now the disease is exacerbated by Islamofascism. Come Tuesday, we will find out if our current generation is up to the task. I hope and pray that we are.
October 29th, 2004 at 8:37 pm
You can’t make this stuff up. Only they did.
It is really getting bad here in Western Civilization Land. First we lost religion. Then art falls to pieces. And now even science is biting the dust.
I’m with Ann Coulter on this one. Reasonable people have been playing nice for too long. They want a street fight, it’s time for a street fight. Only civilization itself depends upon it.
October 29th, 2004 at 8:38 pm
“The number of 100,000 dead so far in Iraq in this peer reviewed study is the best estimate we’re likely to get since the Bush administration refuses even to engage in a count.” –Alterman
October 29th, 2004 at 8:53 pm
“”Removing half the increase in infant deaths and the Falluja data still produces a 37% increase in estimated mortality.”
That puts their final numbers just above the high end of the range reported by other sources.”
Ummm, no it doesn’t. That puts their numbers at 66,600 dead.
37% higher than an annualized mortality rate of 5/1,000 is 6.85/1,000.
Now, if we take 24 million Iraqis as a given here, it should look something like this.
Pre-War
24,000,000 Iraqis/1,000=24,000×5=120,000×1.5 years=180,000 total deaths.
Post-War
24,000,000 Iraqis/1,000=24,000×6.85=164,400×1.5 years=246,600 total deaths.
Difference=66,600
Since when is that “just above the high end of the range reported by other sources”?
October 29th, 2004 at 9:16 pm
If the smug, safe-in-Chicago folks were subjected to random acts of violence by the US forces, perhaps they would be joining the insurgency to free their country. See -
http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/incident_on_haifa_street.htm
if you have any intellectual curiosity.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:18 pm
Clashman–
I couldn’t follow your math or your point. But this study is absolute crap. It shows a relative risk sans Fallujah of 1.5, which is one half the level accepted by leading medical journals for publication. Even if their numbers aren’t wildly skewed by sampling bias and the kazillion confounders they can’t control for, they are not statistically relevant. An RR of 1.5 means their data only “explains” 1/3 of the deaths. The other two-thirds are explained by something else.
I call B.S. The Lancet “researchers” should be ashamed of themselves.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:25 pm
Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey
Summary Background
In March, 2003, military forces, mainly from the USA and the UK, invaded Iraq. We did a survey to compare mortality during the period of 14·6 months before the invasion with the 17·8 months after it.
Methods
A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004. 33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002. In those households reporting deaths, the date, cause, and circumstances of violent deaths were recorded. We assessed the relative risk of death associated with the 2003 invasion and occupation by comparing mortality in the 17·8 months after the invasion with the 14·6-month period preceding it.
FindingsThe risk of death was estimated to be 2·5-fold (95% CI 1·6–4·2) higher after the invasion when compared with the preinvasion period. Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja. If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1·5-fold (1·1–2·3) higher after the invasion. We estimate that 98,000 more deaths than expected (8000–194000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included.
The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death. Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters, and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher (95% CI 8·1–419) than in the period before the war.
Interpretation
Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. We have shown that collection of public-health information is possible even during periods of extreme violence. Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce noncombatant deaths from air strikes.
Published online October 29, 2004 http://image.thelancet.com/ extras/04art10342web.pdf
Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA (L Roberts PhD, G Burnham MD); Department of Community Medicine, College of Medicine, Al-Mustansiriya University, Baghdad, Iraq(R Lafta MD, J Khudhairi MD); and School of Nursing, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA (ProfRGarfieldDrPH)
Correspondence to: Dr Les Roberts les@a-znet.com Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, Gilbert Burnham
October 29th, 2004 at 9:37 pm
“Our findings need to be independently verified with a larger sample group. However, I think our survey demonstrates the importance of collecting civilian casualty information during a war and that it can be done,”
said lead author Les Roberts, PhD, an associate with the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:46 pm
Before you all congratulate yourself too much, I should point that Ms. Love apparently didn’t read the Lancet paper in question. Or, more likely, she read it but didn’t understand what she was reading.
Case in point: Ms. Love makes the following grand pronouncement (and with such flourish!):
“And bingo we see that:
‘Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja’”
What Ms. Love failed to comprehend (or maybe did comprehend but decided to leave out), is that the Fallujah data is an outlier, and is not included in the estimated 100,000 dead. To quote from the abstract:
“Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja. If we
exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1·5-fold (1·1–2·3) higher after the invasion. We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000–194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the
outlier Falluja cluster is included.”
Ms. Love’s faulty analysis wouldn’t make it into any refereed journal. It’s easy to post it on a blog, and fool some people into thinking that she actually has something to say.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:50 pm
The Shorter Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey
The researchers conducted their survey in September 2004. They randomly selected 33 neighborhoods of 30 homes from across Iraq and interviewed the residents about the number and ages of the people living in each home. Over 7,800 Iraqis were included. Residents were questioned about the number of births and deaths that occurred in the household since January 2002. Information was also collected about the causes and circumstances of each death. When possible, the deaths were verified with a death certificate or other documentation.
The researchers compared the mortality rate among civilians in Iraq during the 14.6 months prior to the March 2003 invasion with the 17.8 month period following the invasion. The sample group reported 46 deaths prior to the March 2003 and 142 deaths following the invasion. The results were calculated twice, both with and without information from the city of Falluja. The researchers felt the excessive violence from combat in Falluja could skew the overall mortality rates. Excluding information from Falluja, they estimate that 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred. Eighty-four percent of the deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery.
“There is a real necessity for accurate monitoring of civilian deaths during combat situations. Otherwise it is impossible to know the extent of the problems civilians may be facing or how to protect them,” explained study co-author Gilbert Burnham, MD, associate professor of International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Center for International, Disaster and Refugee Studies. (emphasis added)
October 29th, 2004 at 10:26 pm
Of course liberations spill blood. But given the record of the Husseins and the UN’s oil-for-starvation-and-embezzlement program, the liberation of Iraq drastically reduced the number of needless innocent deaths over the next thirty years. The first 30 years of the Husseins cost a million lives. The likelihood that the next 30 years will come anywhere near that is extremely small. Quibble over 20K or 100K all you want. The bottom line is that life was preserved by the liberation. And this leaves aside the important point that it’s life of greater liberty.
October 29th, 2004 at 10:36 pm
Just wanted to add that in the study, it says that many of the male violent deaths may be combatant deaths…
That means that any number of the males who were recorded as having died violently, could have been killed as a military person or insurgent, aka not civilian.
Their 100K figure includes these “maybe combatants”, yet they still say on the title “civilians”.
Why? How can they say that 100K civilians have died, when in fact 50K of them could have been non-civilian combatants?
Anyone notice their range for that number of possible excess deaths caused by the war?
8K-194K? Isn’t that a bit of a large range??
This survey is a sham, and the timing of it only goes further to prove it.
October 29th, 2004 at 10:59 pm
William Trippe,
I didn’t mean to include the Falujah to downgrade the 100,000 figure but to show that cluster-sampling with an asymmetrical distribution results in garbage. Violence in Iraq, especially air strikes, occur in very geographically focused areas down to specific neighborhoods in specific cities. Cluster sampling is not the kind of sampling you want to use in this situation. One or two clusters could throw off everything.
Excluding Faluja, Table 2 in the paper shows that their “conservative estimate” of 51,000 was extrapolated from the unverified reports of 21 deaths in 14 clusters. That’s bullshit.
This kind of methodology is not what we want to base public policy on.
October 29th, 2004 at 11:45 pm
More On The Iraq Civilian Body Count
Yesterday I complained about the survey which is getting major play in the press right now claiming 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq. I pointed out that, to me, the way they arrived at their numbers didn’t seem very scientific. Now…
October 29th, 2004 at 11:47 pm
William Trippe wrote:
I would turn that statement around: the neat thing about blogs is that a reader who finds problems with a post can provide instant feedback in the comments section, and the author can then either refute the commenter’s argument or correct his own. How many months would such a feedback process require in a refereed journal? Some of the most able people who post on blogs couldn’t even get an article considered for publication in a refereed journal.
It seems to me that blogs are an extremely valuable supplement to traditional means of vetting and disseminating information.
October 30th, 2004 at 12:06 am
Isn’t anyone else bother by the incredibly wide 95% confidence intervals? Come on now, they are 95% certain that the real war-related death increase lies somewhere between 8,000 and 98,000? That’s awful, right?
October 30th, 2004 at 1:36 am
[deleted by admin]
October 30th, 2004 at 2:05 am
I just heard the man who made this “100′000″ report.
He contradicted himself the whole interview (from memory):
“journalist cnn”: You took your sample in bagdhad & Fallhoujah ?
“Pr. 100′000″: No, it was too high numbers. We didn’t used them
“Journalist”: How do you explain the difference between your report and the witness/journalists/humanitarians reports ?
“Pr. 100′000″: Witness like journalist cannot go anywhere in Falloujah & Bagdad beccause it’s too dangerous.
First he said that Bagdad/Falloujah & other dangerous places of the sunni triangle were not used, but after he contradict himself and suggest that the whole report is based on sunni triangle…
I almost saw Michael Moore’s arm moving the puppet ;-)
October 30th, 2004 at 3:19 am
[deleted by admin]
October 30th, 2004 at 3:39 am
Brice,
How many lives could you have saved if you had bombed Hitler in Berlin in 1935? Suppose it had meant 10,000 dead and massive destruction to the capital of Germany? Would it have been worth it?
Now who in their right mind in 1935 would have given the OK for such an operation?
Just as 7 Dec 1941 changed the weightings in the calculations of war and peace for some, so did 11 Sept 2001. For some of us, risks that we once dismissed now loom larger.
Sorry to say 10 Sept is not coming back for many decades. The rule now is: shoot first and ask questions afterwards. If this scares our enemies it is a good thing. If it only kills them it is a good thing. If 10,000 innocents die to prevent the start of a nuclear war it is a good thing. Even if the knowns are indeterminant.
9/11 changed the weightings of the risks for some of us. For others it will always be 1935.
Did I mention that war sucks?
Tell it to the jumpers of 11 Sept. See if you get an answer.
October 30th, 2004 at 5:00 am
I did an analysis here, some points basically the same as yours, plus one more… you can get a very rough estimate of the number of combatant deaths in their sample from the sex ratio… it matches other known estimates.
http://obsidianorder.blogspot.com/2004/10/pick-number-any-number.html
After doing that, the non-combatant death count directly due to coalition forces is also similar to other estimates, 5-10,000. Aside from that, obviously the sample is too small and the clustering adds a lot of variability and all the other problems you mention. Yeah, the study is politically motivated trash.
October 30th, 2004 at 5:14 am
Fred Kaplan comes to much the same conclusion in Slate.
October 30th, 2004 at 5:44 am
Ms. Love,
As an author of papers published in peer-reviewed journals, I was struck by the extraordinarily compressed time-line of this publication. Readers outside the biomedical fields might consider what the peer-review process involved:
1. Data were collected in September 2004, and the authors had completed compilation, statistical analysis, drafting of text, artwork, and proofreading in order to submit their work in the form of a for-publication draft manuscript (MS) to the Lancet Editor.
2. The Editor read the MS, chose peer-reviewers, had the reviewers comment on the MS, evaluated these comments, passed his/her favorable judgement on the MS to the authors, with any suggestions for necessary or advisable revisions.
3. The authors revised the MS and resubmitted it.
4. The Editor and perhaps the peer-reviewers reviewed and approved the revised text and figures. The MS files were sent to the Lancet’s copy editors for proofreading and digital typesetting. Author queries were generated and sent to the lead author, and the responses incorporated into the typeset version. Finally, the complete manuscript, ready for printing, was published on the Lancet’s website.
Four to eight weeks is an unusually short time for a high-impact journal such as the Lancet to bring such an article into print. I would doubt that Lancet, JAMA, Nature, BMJ, Science, or similar high-prestige journals have ever compressed their review and publication schedule in such a drastic manner.
Given the irregularity of this procedure, the serious methodological shortcomings that have already been identified, and the misleading and politicized interpretation of the study’s results in its summary, it strikes me that readers would be justified in demanding to take a closer look at what the “peer-review” process actually involved in this case. The authors of the study and the Lancet’s Editor should agree to release the correspondence and email between the lead author and editior. In particular, readers are entitled to see the peer-review evaluations of the submitted MS. This would enable readers to see whether Lancet maintained its usual standards in these highly irregular circumstances, or whether the reviews were cursory, or the authors’ responses inadequate.
October 30th, 2004 at 6:22 am
Most of what I’ve read on this page is reminicent of Orwellian newspeak. It’s frightening. We are so used to spin we’ve learned it off pat, meanwhile the truth wanders off in an unconcerned daze. We are creating differences that are widening year after year, getting more and more spitefull. Humans never learn do they. I feel a nasty world war coming on.
October 30th, 2004 at 7:06 am
>>Seen anything like that on the news?
No…. if you happen to live in the U.S. that is - where the news is filtered and sanitized. I don’t think this figure will be any big surprise to European or Japanese or Middle Eastern viewers who get an unvarnished account (as they should) of American atrocities.
The figure may be indeed be high but there’s no doubt civilians are paying a high price in this conflict, in large part because the american public -high on nationalism and self-righteousness and self-cnteredness- just doesn’t give a damn.
October 30th, 2004 at 7:10 am
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October 30th, 2004 at 7:56 am
right off the bat this argument fails: you state that the news would have covered that many deaths. I believe 1000+ US soldiers have died in Iraq, yet I wouldn’t know that by the photos of the caskets.
geez, try something new…try thinking.
October 30th, 2004 at 8:58 am
Editorial
THE LANCET
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More contact details at
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October 30th, 2004 at 9:43 am
And yet, blames (last name america) knows the number of casualties that have occurred. The facts have still been reported, just without the sensationalized photos that the military has NEVER released, in prior administrations.
October 30th, 2004 at 9:59 am
I have a bit more analysis of the infant mortality rates (and other stuff) over at my blog:
http://randombirkel.blogspot.com/
I provide some quantitative and qualitative analysis.
There are three separate posts on the matter.
(Sorry for the self-promo but I thought it might interest yoru readers.)
October 30th, 2004 at 10:32 am
Scary revisionist math. Maybe you can apply that same methodology to the Holocaust and say that the 6 million dead were a myth (or just one-third, as if that makes it any better). Denial and obfuscation are the hallmarks of a scary time that seems to descend upon us. I oftern wondered how it could have been that people put their heads in the sand while death and destruction was obvious during WWII. Now I know.
Being a Chicago Boy myself, I wonder how it would be any better that 300 people a year were murdered in the City instead of 900. Does that make it any better? And lest we forget, does the phrase “Lies, damn lies, and statistics” mean anything anymore?
October 30th, 2004 at 10:37 am
James:
I think you don’t get the point of these critiques. The Lancet article is purporting to present SCIENCE, not opinion. Scientific studies have an accepted structure and use accepted methods of data gathering and statistical analysis. Any scientific study can be (must be!) examined against this framework of validity.
Talking about whether or not 8,000 or 1,000,000 Iraqis died does not show callousness. People here are merely subjecting the material in the Lancet article to an analysis of the “quality” of the data/conclusions. The article IS about numbers of dead people, after all.
A “junk science” article with illegitimate conclusions does NOTHING to further reasonable public policy.
October 30th, 2004 at 10:37 am
Indeed, it is scary that a supposedly “respectable” publication like the Lancet could engage in such blatant numerical revisionism in an attempt to influence an election.
Whatever happened to honesty? Why is a medical journal using statistical lies to play politics?
The only bright spot is that blogs like this have emerged to combat the lies.
October 30th, 2004 at 10:39 am
So the US media is ’sanitized’ but the European media is objective about American ‘atrocities’, the undoubtedly sophisticated anonymous reader says, using the name of the Goddess Of War as a pseudonym.
So many levels of irony, so little time…
Enough games. Back to watching those unfiltered terrorist atrocities and other beheadings the Athenas of the world will never see.
October 30th, 2004 at 11:04 am
I am voting for Bush because he is demonstrably the better of the candidates who have any chance of winning. Kerry was for the war in Viet Nam (highly decorated patriot as announced to a smarmy degree at the Dem’s convention) and against the war in Viet Nam (leader of Vets against that war), and nothing has changed since. We need Churchill, not Chamberlin.
October 30th, 2004 at 11:07 am
100,000 is such a shocking number and would be such a black mark on our national moral pride that it’s understandable that all of you should be working so hard to deny it.
Carry on.
October 30th, 2004 at 11:26 am
Archie, 100,000 did not seem such a shocking number when the victims were gassed Kurds, Marsh Arabs or Shias dying under Baathist repression.
Given the shallow hypocrisy of your fashionably self-loathing moral posturing, it is no wonder you want to believe in this number, is it ?
“Carry on”.
October 30th, 2004 at 11:32 am
The study’s pre-invasion crude mortality rate also seems