17 |
Civilian casualties
commissioned,
had been produced by Dr Bill Kirkup, one of the Department of
Health’s
Regional
Directors of Public Health and its lead on health in
Iraq.
176.
Dr Kirkup’s
assessment was more detailed and more critical of the
Lancet
study than
the assessments undertaken earlier by Professor Anderson and
Mr Butler.
He stated:
“Less than
a thousand [households] … is a small number on which to base
death
rates … The
confidence intervals are correspondingly very wide … A
confidence
interval
this large makes the meaning of the estimate very difficult to
interpret …
“Cluster
sampling may not be appropriate when there is a large element
of
discontinuity
in the population experience. Clearly, some parts of Iraq have
seen
much more
violence than others …”
177.
Dr Kirkup
stated that, according to his calculations, the study’s conclusion
that
“violence
accounted for most of the excess deaths” was only true if the
“bizarre” Fallujah
cluster was
included (the study stated that that cluster was not included in
its central
estimate of
98,000 excess deaths). Dr Kirkup calculated that if the Fallujah
cluster
was not
included, just over 23,000 of the 98,000 estimated excess deaths
were due
to violence.
178.
Dr Kirkup
stated that it was not possible, from the data provided in the
study, to
confirm the
study’s conclusion that “air strikes from coalition forces
accounted for most
violent
deaths”.
179.
Dr Kirkup
explained his characterisation of the Fallujah projection as
“bizarre”. The
study
estimated that there had been 200,000 excess deaths in Fallujah
(using the same
techniques
as for other areas). That would represent a loss of nearly 28
percent of the
population
of Fallujah in just 14 months. Dr Kirkup commented: “Something has
plainly
gone so
badly wrong with the estimates in Fallujah that it must cast doubt
on the validity
of the rest
of the findings.”
180.
Dr Kirkup
concluded:
“… the
paper suffers from wide confidence intervals, dubious methodology,
the
likelihood
of significant respondent bias and results that are disastrously
skewed by
the
Fallujah outlier. The authors have been tempted into extrapolations
based on
shaky data
that lack face validity, and in two cases are not even borne out by
their
own
results.”
201