- PARIS (AFP) - A group of
top public-health physicians has branded the official toll of civilian
dead from the Iraqi war as a serious underestimate and demanded an independent
probe to establish the full casualty figures.
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- Their statement is published this Saturday in the weekly
British Medical Journal (BMJ) as the second anniversary of the war looms
on March 20.
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- It marks a fresh attempt by medical campaigners to establish
the number of Iraqi civilian casualties after a rough estimate of 100,000
dead, made by epidemiologists last October, was brushed aside by the British
government.
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- "Monitoring casualties is a humanitarian imperative,"
the statement said.
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- "Understanding the causes of death is a core public-health
responsibility, nationally and internationally.
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- Need for proper figures
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- "Yet neither the public, nor we as public-health
professionals, are able to obtain validated, reliable information about
the extent of mortality and morbidity since the invasion of Iraq."
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- The statement is signed by 23 leading specialists from
five countries (the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and Spain),
led by Klim McPherson, a visiting professor of epidemiology at the University
of Oxford.
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- The doctors pour scorn on the sole official toll, compiled
by the Iraqi ministry of health.
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- This lists 3,853 civilian deaths and 15,517 injuries
during the first six months of the war, the BMJ said separately in a news
report.
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- The signatories complained that the ministry is "likely
seriously to underestimate" the toll, as it only includes violence-related
deaths that are officially reported through the health system, nor mortality
from non-violent causes.
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- The October 2004 estimate of around 100,000 civilian
deaths, published in the British journal The Lancet, was based on interviews
among people in 988 households who were asked about deaths among their
families. The figures were then extrapolated nationally.
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- The deaths were caused mainly by violence (with coalition
air strikes the biggest attributed sources), as well as additional cases
of fatal heart attack, stroke, neo-natal death and infectious disease inflicted
by the conflict, The Lancet study said.
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- Its authors said it was a useful, and conservatively
derived, estimate but acknowledged its limitations, both in the number
of interviews and the conditions in which the questions were made.
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- The British Foreign Office described The Lancet figures
as unreliable and said it had no legal responsibility under the Geneva
Convention to count civilian casualties, a position also taken by its ally,
the United States.
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