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By Brooks A. Mick, M.D.
Oct. 18, 2006 Much is being made of the Johns Hopkins report in the Lancet, a British medical journal, that 655,000 innocent Iraqi lives have been lost secondary to the war in Iraq. The study is based on statistical methods, not actual body counts. Commanders on the ground have established the death number at around 50,000, a considerable discrepancy. A close examination of the report in the Lancet indicates that the Johns Hopkins team used 47 sample points in accumulating their data and reaching their statistical conclusions. Surveys in the USA often use similar statistical methods, but use telephone surveys. I In Iraq, such methods were not feasible, and some neighborhoods were selected at random and door-to-door surveys were conducted and individuals were interviewed. As noted, this resulted in 47 data points. The problem with this statistical methodology is that 47 data points are not sufficient to reach a valid statistical conclusion in a moderate-sized high school, let alone an entire country. The sample size was simply too small. Thus the conclusion is simply not believable. Indeed, the statistical analysis of the data would lead one to the conclusion that the results might be as much as 1200% off, according to an expert pollster from the firm of Gorton Moore International. One would think that statisticians who wrote an article for Lancet, and the peer reviewers of the journal itself, would have recognized the limitations and unreliability of their sampling method. Perhaps they did, and perhaps they hoped that others wouldn't notice. ------------ About the author Brooks A. Mick: Physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre. Email: brooks15@cox.net Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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