Iraq Family Health Survey Compared With Lancet Studies
See also: Iraq Family Health SurveyThe "Iraq Family Health Survey" published in the New England Journal of Medicine surveyed 9,345 households across Iraq and estimated 151,000 deaths due to violence (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) over the same period covered in the second Lancet survey by Burnham et al. The NEJM article stated that the second Lancet survey "considerably overestimated the number of violent deaths and said the Lancet results were, "highly improbable, given the internal and external consistency of the data and the much larger sample size and quality-control measures taken in the implementation of the IFHS."
The figures provided by this survey on the total violent deaths in Iraq, are lower than Lancet's estimate by a factor of roughly 4. However, despite the differences, Lancet co-author Les Roberts said there were a few underlying similarities as well, such as a doubling of mortality rate after the invasion of Iraq in the study, compared to the 2.4-fold increase reported by Lancet. It has been estimated by Roberts that the "excess death" toll in the IFHS survey would be about 400,000, which he says, puts these figures in league with Lancet's. Roberts says the discrepancy between the two studies arise with Lancet attributing most of the post-war excess deaths to violence, while only one-third of the excess deaths would be due to violence in the IFHS. See: Iraq Family Health Survey#400,000
The authors of the IFHS report have disputed this conclusion, saying, "The excess deaths reported by Burnham et al. included only 8.2% of deaths from nonviolent causes, so inclusion of these deaths will not increase the agreement between the estimates from the IFHS and Burnham et al." They defended the results of their survey saying, "It is unlikely that a small survey with only 47 clusters has provided a more accurate estimate of violence-related mortality than a much larger survey sampling of 971 clusters."
Read more about this topic: Lancet Surveys Of Iraq War Casualties
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