100 000 Irakijczyków zginęło od początku wojny


PAP, mat /2004-10-28 20:36:00

Sto tysięcy cywilów, w większości kobiet i dzieci, zginęło w Iraku od marca 2003, gdy amerykańska armia i jej sojusznicy rozpoczęli okupację - podali specjaliści ds. zdrowia publicznego w raporcie, który publikuje brytyjski magazyn medyczny "The Lancet".

Raport wymienia głównie ofiary przemocy i nalotów bombowych sił koalicji, wśród których najwięcej było kobiet i dzieci. Dokładność badań była ograniczona, ponieważ badacze opierali się przede wszystkim informacjach uzyskiwanych bezpośrednio od Irakijczyków.
W projekcie brali udział naukowcy z amerykańskich uniwersytetów Johnsa Hopkinsa i Columbia oraz Al-Mustansirija w Bagdadzie. Wyniki opublikowano na stronach internetowych magazynu "The Lancet".
Do tej pory nie opracowano żadnego oficjalnego raportu, szacującego liczbę ofiar irackiego konfliktu.

http://info.onet.pl/1001138,12,item.html



mz 29-10-2004, ostatnia aktualizacja 29-10-2004 18:16

W konsekwencji inwazji na Irak śmierć poniosło 100 tys. ludzi - donosi "The Lancet", najbardziej prestiżowe pismo medyczne na świecie

http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/swiat/1,34174,2367579.html?v=0&f=50

The present conflict in Iraq signals a contrast of paradoxical proportions. The Iraqi people, their interim government, and their largely US and British occupiers are preparing for landmark elections early in the new year. Yet a ruthlessly violent insurgency is successfully destabilising these arrangements, murdering foreign civilians and Iraqi law enforcement officers in the most brutal ways imaginable, and exploiting the world's media in doing so. Amid this deep national uncertainty, it is hard to judge what is happening among Iraqis themselves. This week The Lancet publishes the first scientific study of the effects of this war on Iraqi civilians.

In a unique US-Iraqi collaboration, Les Roberts and his colleagues report substantially more deaths in Iraq since the war began than during the period immediately before the conflict. Much of this increased mortality is a consequence of the prevailing climate of violence in the country, and many of the civilian casualties that are described were attributed to the actions of coalition forces. These findings-and the tentative countrywide mortality projections they support-have immediately translatable policy implications for those charged with managing the aftermath of invasion.

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http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04cmt384web.pdf (32kb)

100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, says study

Sarah Boseley, health editor

10/29/04 "The Guardian" -- About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts. The study, which was carried out in 33 randomly-chosen neighbourhoods of Iraq representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Before the invasion, most people died of heart attacks, stroke and chronic illness. The risk of a violent death is now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion.

Last night the Lancet medical journal fast-tracked the survey to publication on its website after rapid, but extensive peer review and editing because, said Lancet editor Richard Horton, "of its importance to the evolving security situation in Iraq". But the findings raised important questions also for the governments of the United Sates and Britain who, said Dr Horton in a commentary, "must have considered the likely effects of their actions for civilians".

The research was led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. Five of the six Iraqi interviewers who went to the 988 households in the survey were doctors and all those involved in the research on the ground, says the paper, risked their lives to collect the data. Householders were asked about births and deaths in the 14.6 months before the March 2003 invasion, and births and deaths in the 17.8 months afterwards.

When death certificates were not available, there were good reasons, say the authors. "We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded. Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths," they write.

They found an increase in infant mortality from 29 to 57 deaths per 1,000 live births, which is consistent with the pattern in wars, where women are unable or unwilling to get to hospital to deliver babies, they say. The other increase was in violent death, which was reported in 15 of the 33 clusters studied and which was mostly attributed to airstrikes.

"Despite widespread Iraqi casualties, household interview data do not show evidence of widespread wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers on the ground," write the researchers. Only three of the 61 deaths involved coalition soldiers killing Iraqis with small arms fire. In one case, a 56-year-old man might have been a combatant, they say, in the second a 72-year-old man was shot at a checkpoint and in the third, an armed guard was mistaken for a combatant and shot during a skirmish. In the second two cases, American soldiers apologised to the families.

"The remaining 58 killings (all attributed to US forces by interviewees) were caused by helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry," they write.

The biggest death toll recorded by the researchers was in Falluja, which registered two-thirds of the violent deaths they found. "In Falluja, 23 households of 52 visited were either temporarily or permanently abandoned. Neighbours interviewed described widespread death in most of the abandoned houses but could not give adequate details for inclusion in the survey," they write.

The researchers criticise the failure of the coalition authorities to attempt to assess for themselves the scale of the civilian casualties.

"US General Tommy Franks is widely quoted as saying 'we don't do body counts'," they write, but occupying armies have responsibilities under the Geneva convention."This survey shows that with modest funds, four weeks and seven Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilan deaths could be obtained."

Copyright: The Guardian.

THE WORLD

Conflict May Have Killed 100,000 Iraqis, Report Says

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-deaths29oct29,1,1087953.story?coll=la-headlines-world

LONDON — As many as 100,000 Iraqis may have been killed, most of them by violence, as a result of the U.S.-led invasion, American public health experts estimated in a report released Thursday.

There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some nongovernmental estimates had put the number between 10,000 and 30,000. More than 1,100 U.S. service personnel have died.

The scientists who wrote the report said the data on which they based their projections had "limited precision" because the quality of the information depended on the accuracy of the household interviews used.

Designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the study was published Thursday on the website of the Lancet medical journal.

The survey indicated that airstrikes from coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths, the researchers wrote.

"The use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children," Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in an interview.

Oxford University's Richard Peto, an expert on study methods who was not involved in the research, said the approach the scientists took was reasonable. However, it's possible they zoned in on spots that might not be representative of the death toll across Iraq, he said.

Lancet Editor Richard Horton wrote in an editorial accompanying the survey that including more households would have improved the precision of the report, "but at an enormous and unacceptable risk to the team of interviewers."

Investigators in September visited 33 neighborhoods spread evenly across the country, randomly selecting clusters of about 30 households to sample. Of the 988 households visited, 808 agreed to participate.

Researchers asked participants how many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths had occurred since January 2002. The death rate and Iraq's estimated population were then used to estimate the number of deaths.

More than a third of the post-invasion deaths were reported in one cluster of households in the city of Fallouja, where fighting has been intense.

The death rate more than doubled after the war.

But even when the researchers recalculated the effect without the Fallouja figures, deaths were 1.5 times the rate of that before the war.

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.

Findings The 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 98000 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 100000 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 non-combatant deaths from air strikes.

http://www.thelancet.com/journal/vol364/iss9445/full/llan.364.9445.early_online_publication.31137.1