Monday, 16 October 2006 - 9:10 PM CDT

FYI, the mortality rate for Iraq as 5.5 is not something the Lancet made up. It is also the accepted rate from the CIA.

It may me horribly wrong because of lack of reporting in dictatorships (and it seems horribly wrong), but the lancet isn't just pulling figures out of the air

Tuesday, 17 October 2006 - 2:18 AM CDT

So I have been informed, it would be interesting to know how the CIA arrived at such a ridiculous number, but then we really did not have many Huminit sources in that region did we?

Be that as it may FYI

"Three misattributed clusters were excluded from the final analysis; data from 1849 households that contained 12801 individuals in 47 clusters was gathered. 1474 births and 629 deaths were reported during the observation period. Pre-invasion mortality rates were 5?5 per 1000 people per year (95% CI 4?3–7?1), compared with 13?3 per 1000 people per year (10?9–16?1) in the 40 months post-invasion"

Can be found in the Summary of the Study

Under Methods we find

"Methods
Participants and procedures
To measure mortality we did a national cross-sectional cohort study of deaths from January, 2002, through July, 2006. Household information was gathered about deaths that occurred between January 1, 2002, and the invasion of March 18, 2003, in all households and these data were compared with deaths that occurred from the time of the invasion through to the date of survey. A sample size of 12000 was calculated to be adequate to identify a doubling of an estimated pre-invasion crude mortality rate of 5?0 per 1000 people per year with 95% confidence and a power of 80%, and was chosen to balance the need for robust data with the level of risk acceptable to field teams. Sampling followed the same approach used in 2004,8 except that selection of survey sites was by random numbers applied to streets or blocks rather than with global positioning units (GPS), since surveyors felt that being seen with a GPS unit could put their lives at risk. The use of GPS units might be seen as targeting an area for air strikes, or that the unit was in reality a remote detonation control. By confining the survey to a cluster of houses close to one another it was felt the benign purpose of the survey would spread quickly by word of mouth among households, thus lessening risk to interviewers"

SO the Lancet study does NOT derive their data from any CIA figures, but instead claim that the Base Line Mortality Rate comes from their own study.

Does the figure seem reasonable?

We are left with only two alternatives.

The Base Line Data is accurate or The Study used "cooked" figures to obtain a desired result.

Which do you think is the most likely?

Monday, 6 November 2006 - 5:35 PM CST

The quality of public health care has only little to do with the country's mortality rate. Have a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Death_rate_world_map.PNG

Living conditions in India are far worse than those in France,
but the baseline mortality rate is lower - since the demographic structure differs. The criticism of The Lancet's methods of sampling may still be correct - but complaining about wrong mortality rates misses the point.