Thanks for the nod. It is greatly appreciated. There is a lot of great info in your comments section that might shame what I collected on my blog. What a crowd.

But I do want to let people know that I’ve got two other postings at Random Birkel that detail other significant information. Most importantly The Lancet underestimated the infant mortality rate by a mere 500%.

And then the report gets unbelievable!!

It is also a direct attack on our military. This is not just an attack on Bush, they are quite plainly calling the US military baby killers.

Where have we heard this before? Do these folks ever get an original idea?

Well now if someboy wants an excuse to spit in a soldier’s face these fine upstanding folks have provided them with one.

I wonder if any of these people said anything about the Iraqis before the invasion? Or if they are card carrying members of the Saddam fan club. Maybe they would like us turn him loose. They could do a survey and ask the Iraqi people about that. But they probably would not get past Fallujah, again.

Here is what the Lancet article says: If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1.5-fold (1.1-2.3) higher after the invasion.

For those of you not familiar with epidemiology, 1.5 is the relative risk, or multiplier, placed on normal mortality in this case.

Two points:

1. The threshold for publication in most leading medical journals is an RR of 3.0. This means Lancet has pushed this thing into print by lowering its own standards.

2. An RR of 1.5 means that (1.5-1.0) / 1.5 is the percentage “explained” by their data, or 33%. In other words, 66% of the explanation is due to something other than the war!

So to recap, Lancet publishes a study using highly flawed survey methods with numerous systematic and other biases, lowers its own standards and rushes its peer review to get it into print. And even then their numbers don’t prove anything.

This is junk science of the worst kind. Pathetic.

Mengele was a gifted doctor. Smart people can be stupid [or worse] too, especially when politics are involved.

I am beginning to wonder about these NGOs. They are too international politics what 527s are to our electoral process.

A few years ago a study in the Lancelet claimed that MMR vaccine caused autism. This caused a worldwide scare. But the study was crap. The author, Andrew Wakefield, was paid to produce a study linking MMR with autism:

The issue of funding aside, there is another, perhaps more fundamental, issue. After lengthy investigations by The Sunday Times, Wakefield finally admitted last week that ìfour, perhaps fiveî of the children in his Lancet study were among the 10 named in the legal aid contract. Was it four or five? ìLetís make it five,î he said. The questioning went on. Were they litigants? Yes. Was he being paid to help them to build their case? Yes.

source

Here’s what Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancelet said about the fiasco:

“All in all, my attitude was far too laissez faire. If this is what critics meantóand still meanóby reckless, then I am guilty of that charge. I failed to do enough to manage the media reaction to this work. Until the Wakefield paper, I had not seen this media management role as one for a scientific medical journal editor. I now see it as one of my main responsibilities.”

source

Media management. I think that speaks for itself. Horton is still the editor at the Lancelet. He provided an editorial accusing the US of “democratic imperialism” to accompany this latest study.

Interesting.

Those look like good credentials to me. Although I agree about the sloppy methodology and the politicizing of the report.

No sh*t, Sherlock! Can’t you see the poor thugs telling the English lefties how they just wanted to be left in peace to tend their goats and that their daughters, wives, aunts, nephews, etc. were being massacred?

The tip-off was that bit about “airstrikes.” Quiz: How many airstrikes not involving Al Sadr and not including Fallujah have been made since May 2003?

This thing is even worse than I thought. Somebody with a website should put the numbers into a spreadsheet and fit a regression onto them. I’m virtually positive it will show a correlation coefficient near zero.

Hello. I hope you are better.

I would have thought 15,000 to 25,000, especially if you included the pounding the Iraqi army took as the US came in last year.

But I don’t know. We are still finding mass graves and there was so much propaganda associated with sanctions that if we believe 100,000 children were dying a year because of evil US supported sanctions against the Iraqi people it makes it somewhat more difficult to believe that the primary cause of death before the invasion was heart attack. It seems the left gets lost in the maze of their own propaganda.

This is Iraq, it is so hard to know the truth, but I think we would be seeing some breathless and excited news people standing next to the mounds of dead bodies if we had indeed killed 100,000 civilians in bombing raids.