Deaths - Iraq vs. U.S.

The mainstream media tries to ensure that we are continually reminded of how dangerous Iraq is with the breathless reporting of every single car bomb or other violent event. For today's reporting see Washington Post and BBC for example.  It turns out, however, that Iraq may be a safer place to be than the U.S., if you look at the metric of deaths per thousand population.  The CIA's World Factbook provides 2006 estimates of the rate of death per thousand for the various countries of the world.  The United States is at 8.26 deaths per thousand, or ranked 107th highest of 226 countries.  The ranked list shows that a number of African countries top the list, while the lowest death rates are in the Middle East and some of the Pacific Islands.  Iraq's rate is considerably less at 5.37 deaths per thousand.  In fact the U.S. death rate is higher than a number of countries including China (6.97), Colombia (5.58), Iran (5.55), Mexico (4.74) and Syria (4.81).  One of the lowest is Kuwait with 2.41 deaths per thousand.  So, perhaps the media would be better off publicizing the nature and reasons for death in this country than keeping their incessant focus on Iraq.

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[wingless]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html

One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraqi war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion.

The estimate is based on a September door-to-door survey of 988 Iraqi households -- containing 7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods -- selected to provide a representative sampling. Two survey teams gathered detailed information about the date, cause and circumstances of any deaths in the 14.6 months before the invasion and the 17.8 months after it, documenting the fatalities with death certificates in most cases.

The project was designed by Les Roberts and Gilbert M. Burnham of the Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore; Richard Garfield of Columbia University in New York; and Riyadh Lafta and Jamal Kudhairi of Baghdad's Al-Mustansiriya University College of Medicine.

Based on the number of Iraqi fatalities recorded by the survey teams, the researchers calculated that the death rate since the invasion had increased from 5 percent annually to 7.9 percent. That works out to an excess of about 100,000 deaths since the war, the researchers reported in a paper released early by the Lancet, a British medical journal.

The researchers called their estimate conservative because they excluded deaths in Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad that has been the scene of particularly intense fighting and has accounted for a disproportionately large number of deaths in the survey.

"We are quite confident that there's been somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher," Roberts said.