A Novel Method for Verifying War Mortality while Estimating Iraqi Deaths for the Iran-Iraq War through Operation Desert Storm (1980-1993)

Shang-Ju Li; Abraham Flaxman; Riyadh Lafta; Lindsay Galway; Tim K Takaro; Gilbert Burnham; Amy Hagopian

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0164709

A Novel Method for Verifying War Mortality while Estimating Iraqi Deaths for the Iran-Iraq War through Operation Desert Storm (1980-1993)

PLoS One. 2016 Oct 21;11(10):e0164709. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0164709. eCollection 2016.

Authors

Shang-Ju Li¹, Abraham Flaxman¹, Riyadh Lafta², Lindsay Galway³, Tim K Takaro⁴, Gilbert Burnham⁵, Amy Hagopian¹

Affiliations

¹ University of Washington School of Public Health, Department of Global Health, Seattle, Washington, United States of America.
² Al-Mustansiriya University School of Medicine, Baghdad, Iraq.
³ Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.
⁴ Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Health Sciences, Burnaby, BC, Canada.
⁵ Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, United States of America.

Abstract

Objectives: We estimated war-related Iraqi mortality for the period 1980 through 1993.

Method: To test our hypothesis that deaths reported by siblings (even dating back several decades) would correspond with war events, we compared sibling mortality reports with the frequency of independent news reports about violent historic events. We used data from a survey of 4,287 adults in 2000 Iraqi households conducted in 2011. Interviewees reported on the status of their 24,759 siblings. Death rates were applied to population estimates, 1980 to 1993. News report data came from the ProQuest New York Times database.

Results: About half of sibling-reported deaths across the study period were attributed to direct war-related injuries. The Iran-Iraq war led to nearly 200,000 adult deaths, and the 1990-1991 First Gulf War generated another approximately 40,000 deaths. Deaths during peace intervals before and after each war were significantly lower. We found a relationship between total sibling-reported deaths and the tally of war events across the period, p = 0.02.

Conclusions: We report a novel method to verify the reliability of epidemiological (household survey) estimates of direct war-related injury mortality dating back several decades.

MeSH terms

Adult
Gulf War*
Humans
Iran
Iraq / epidemiology
Mortality*

Grants and funding

Support for this study came from pooled internal resources by the American and Canadian researchers without external funding. No funding bodies had any role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.