Lancet Surveys of Iraq War Casualties - UNDP ILCS Study Compared To Lancet Studies

UNDP ILCS Study Compared To Lancet Studies

UNDP ILCS stands for the 2004 United Nations Development Programme Iraq Living Conditions Survey

The Iraq Body Count project (IBC) records civilian deaths reported by English-language media, including all civilian deaths due to coalition military action, the insurgency or increased criminal violence. The IBC site states: "it should be noted that many deaths will likely go unreported or unrecorded by officials and media."

The IBC death count at the time of the October 2006 Lancet study was released was between 43,546 and 48,343, or roughly 7% of the estimate in the Lancet study. Besides the admitted IBC undercount due to its media reliance, some of the difference between the Lancet and IBC estimates is explained by the fact that the Lancet study was estimating all "excess" deaths from any and all violent and non-violent causes, and includes combatants and civilians alike.

However, IBC believes some of it may also be explained by the Lancet having overestimated, citing the lower estimate from the UNDP's 2004 Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS).

IBC illustrated several of what it calls "the main data that are relevant to a comparative assessment of" the ILCS study and the 2004 Lancet study. It points to, for example, a much larger number of clusters (2,200 for ILCS vs. 33 for Lancet), and a more accurate sampling rate (1 in 200 for ILCS vs. 1 in 3,000 for Lancet). The 2006 Lancet study is somewhat larger than the first (it used 47 clusters instead of 33, and had a lower sampling rate). The 2004 Lancet study surveyed 988 households, and the 2006 Lancet study surveyed 1849 households. The ILCS study surveyed 22,000 households.

Lancet authors draw a different kind of comparison. From Appendix C of the 2006 Lancet study supplement there is this concerning the ILCS study:

"Working for the U.N. Development Program, the highly regarded Norwegian researcher Jon Pederson led a survey that recorded between 18,000 and 29,000 violent deaths during the first year of occupation. The survey was not focused on deaths, but asked about them over the course of lengthy interviews that focused on access to services. While this was more than twice the rate recorded by IBC at the time, Pederson expressed concern for the completeness and quality of the data in a newspaper interview last year. The surveys reported in The Lancet were focused solely on recording deaths and count about two and a half times as many excess deaths from all causes over the same period."

In an October 30, 2006 BBC article Lancet study author Les Roberts compares the number of violent deaths found in the UNDP survey and in the 2 Lancet surveys through the first year after the invasion (by April 2004):

"This UNDP survey covered about 13 months after the invasion. Our first survey recorded almost twice as many violent deaths from the 13th to the 18th months after the invasion as it did during the first 12. The second survey found an excess rate of 2.6/1000/year over the same period corresponding to approximately 70,000 deaths by April 2004. Thus, the rates of violent death recorded in the two survey groups are not so divergent."

In a Media Lens article Les Roberts discussed the UNDP ILCS (Jon Pederson) method of recording deaths:

"His group conducted interviews about living conditions, which averaged about 82 minutes, and recorded many things. Questions about deaths were asked, and if there were any, there were a couple of follow-up questions. A) I suspect that Jon's mortality estimate was not complete. ... Jon sent interviewers back after the survey was over to the same interviewed houses and asked just about <5 year old deaths. The same houses reported ~50% more deaths the second time around. In our surveys, we sent medical doctors who asked primarily about deaths. Thus, I think we got more complete reporting."

The ILCS asked about deaths during the course of a lengthy interview on the household's living conditions. In the 3 main ILCS documents (in pdf form) all the war-related deaths info is in 6 paragraphs on page 54 of the analytical report. It states:

"The ILCS data has been derived from a question posed to households concerning missing and dead persons during the two years prior to the survey. Although the date was not asked for, it is reasonable to suppose that the vast majority of deaths due to warfare occurred after the beginning of 2003."