"Over the last 25 years, this sort of methodology has been used more and more often, especially by relief agencies in times of emergency," said Dr. David Rush, a professor and epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston.
The study, published earlier this month by the Lancet medical journal, employed a method known as "cluster sampling" in which data are collected through interviews with randomly selected households.
in addition:
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimated with 95 percent certainty that the war and its aftermath have resulted in the deaths of between 426,000 and 794,000 Iraqis.
...
Rush, speaking at a meeting in Los Angeles on the medical consequences of the Iraq war, said that the relatively small size of the sample -- 1,849 households -- doesn't change the findings, although it does widen the "confidence limits," hence the large range of the estimated additional deaths.
In addition, the biases inherent in cluster sampling, such as wording of questionnaires, would tend to undercount, rather than inflate, the number of deaths, Rush said.
"I think this is an extremely credible study," said Michael Intriligator, professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles.
So this isn't exactly a shot in the dark; there's sciency-stuff involved. And that's exactly why you'll be regarded as a froot-loop if you bring up this number to somebody like talking head Melanie Morgan.
MORGAN: I think that…yeah, we should have a lot more troops in the beginning. Look, I’m not a cheerleader for the President of the United States. Um, I…I believe that he made the right decision and he did it for the right reasons. I don’t agree with all of the way the war has been prosecuted. I think we should have gone in and just blitzed Iraq. We haven’t had a, a serious war, really, since WWII.
[ from a transcript of Chris Matthews' show ]
