By Robert Mug­gah and Athena Kolbe, LA Times

July 12, 2011– Since the U.S.-led inva­sion of Iraq in 2003, there have been at least 60,000 civil­ian deaths that wouldn’t oth­er­wise have occurred. Or maybe that num­ber is closer to 650,000. Between 1998 and 2004, 5.4 mil­lion peo­ple died in a war and its after­math in the Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic of Congo. Or was it one-fifth that num­ber? In Haiti, fewer than 46,000 peo­ple were killed in the Jan­u­ary 2010 earth­quake. Or per­haps the death toll was more than 300,000.

The sci­ence of mea­sur­ing mor­tal­ity and mor­bid­ity is con­tro­ver­sial. There are bit­ter dis­putes among groups of researchers who study death tolls in the world’s hot spots. Many gov­ern­ments would also pre­fer to dis­creetly avoid any dis­cus­sion of the civil­ian costs of war. Yet the num­bers mat­ter. They can influ­ence polit­i­cal responses to armed con­flicts, famines and nat­ural dis­as­ters. Sta­tis­tics are rou­tinely used to draw atten­tion to evi­dence of sys­tem­atic human rights vio­la­tions and even genocide.

Haiti is the site of the lat­est uproar over civil­ian death counts.

The earth­quake that struck out­side the cap­i­tal last year was with­out doubt Haiti’s worst nat­ural dis­as­ter. Within days of the event, Hait­ian author­i­ties esti­mated that more than 230,000 peo­ple had been killed and another 300,000 injured. A year later, the prime min­is­ter claimed instead that 316,000 cit­i­zens had died. Few out­siders ques­tioned the num­bers or their under­ly­ing method­olo­gies at the time, despite the sta­tis­tics appear­ing to have been plucked out of thin air.

In June, a con­sul­tancy group com­mis­sioned by the U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment offered a dra­mat­i­cally reduced death toll. The authors of the study claimed that between 46,000 and 85,000 Haitians had been killed and another 850,000 assem­bled in camps. Although the num­bers were con­sid­er­ably more con­ser­v­a­tive than the Hait­ian government’s fig­ures, the authors did not ade­quately explain how they were generated.

There are rea­sons to be cau­tious about both the high and the low esti­mates. The Hait­ian gov­ern­ment esti­mates have no fac­tual basis. As for the June report, USAID offi­cials have already dis­tanced them­selves from it, describ­ing it as “inter­nally incon­sis­tent.” The lower esti­mates emerged dur­ing a period of intense crit­i­cism of the slow pace of Haiti’s recov­ery and recon­struc­tion efforts. The report’s tim­ing seems to be part of a wider pat­tern of donor impa­tience and fatigue. Much of the $10 bil­lion pledged for recon­struc­tion has yet to be dis­bursed. By dimin­ish­ing the sever­ity of the sit­u­a­tion, some Hait­ian and for­eign aid groups fear, the lower esti­mates might encour­age donors to jus­tify an ear­lier exit strategy.

Mean­while, the lead author of the study, who works for the Washington-based orga­ni­za­tion LTL, responded by say­ing that “the higher death toll esti­mates were not sup­ported by research or other evi­dence.” Though this is no doubt cor­rect, it amounts to the pot call­ing the ket­tle black.

We arrived at a dif­fer­ent set of num­bers from those pre­vi­ous esti­mates in Haiti, and here’s why we feel ours are more reli­able. With sup­port from the United Nations and the Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment Research Cen­ter, our North American-Haitian team of researchers was able to care­fully exam­ine the costs and con­se­quences of the unfold­ing cri­sis on the ground. After admin­is­ter­ing sev­eral house­hold sur­veys, we esti­mate that there were roughly 158,000 deaths in Port-au-Prince and sur­round­ing areas in the six weeks after the earth­quake. This is at least twice LTL’s esti­mate and half the Hait­ian government’s claim.

Admin­is­ter­ing house­hold sur­veys in any con­flict or dis­as­ter zone is chal­leng­ing. It is often impos­si­ble to come up with a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of the pre-crisis pop­u­la­tion, and there­fore extremely dif­fi­cult to judge how its con­di­tion may have changed in the post-crisis period. Coin­ci­den­tally, we had under­taken a major sur­vey in Haiti in late 2009 that drew on a ran­dom sam­ple of res­i­dents. We then resur­veyed the same house­holds roughly 50 days after the earthquake.

There were for­mi­da­ble obsta­cles to sur­vey­ing the post-quake Hait­ian pop­u­la­tion. We tracked down more than 90% of the orig­i­nal sam­ple, which had spread across Haiti or relo­cated to the Domini­can Repub­lic, Canada and the United States. With­out the ear­lier 2009 sur­vey, we would never have been able to gen­er­ate an accu­rate post-quake sam­ple, owing to the dis­per­sal of residents.

It is incon­ceiv­able that LTL, a year after the quake, inter­viewed a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of the pre-quake pop­u­la­tion. In fact, it appears that LTL arrived at its low mor­tal­ity count by focus­ing nar­rowly on a selec­tion of adult respon­dents. Our study, released in a peer-reviewed jour­nal, indi­cates that chil­dren were at much higher risk of dying. LTL also claims to have asked neigh­bors for infor­ma­tion rather than track­ing down the miss­ing. In our sur­vey, we found many cases of incon­sis­tent report­ing by neighbors.

Estab­lish­ing Haiti’s post-earthquake death count is not an aca­d­e­mic exer­cise. Too often, spu­ri­ous num­bers are invoked to jus­tify spe­cific ide­o­log­i­cal view­points. For exam­ple, in Iraq, peo­ple mak­ing the case that the war was ill-conceived cite higher rates, while those sup­port­ing the inter­ven­tion point to lower ones. In Haiti, there is a risk that those wish­ing to jus­tify reduc­tions in aid may seize on the lower fig­ures, and some Hait­ian offi­cials and relief groups may have strong incen­tives to go with the higher ones.

It is vital that social sci­en­tists get their meth­ods right when count­ing deaths and injuries after cri­sis. This is not just a mat­ter of schol­arly integrity. It has life-and-death impli­ca­tions for poten­tial aid recip­i­ents. A vig­or­ous dis­cus­sion of esti­mates is to be encour­aged, but these must be premised on good sci­ence and not on pol­i­tics or other types of bias. While every sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent, researchers must take care to ensure proper sam­pling pro­ce­dures, dis­close their method­ol­ogy and be trans­par­ent about all of their find­ings, includ­ing biases. It is their duty to ensure that their esti­mates are sound and valid.

Robert Mug­gah is research direc­tor of the Geneva-based Small Arms Sur­vey at the Grad­u­ate Insti­tute of Inter­na­tional and Devel­op­ment Stud­ies. Athena Kolbe works with the Depart­ment of Polit­i­cal Sci­ence and the School of Social Work, Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan. Royce Hut­son, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of social work at Wayne State Uni­ver­sity, and Harry Shan­non, a pro­fes­sor of clin­i­cal epi­demi­ol­ogy and bio­sta­tis­tics at McMas­ter Uni­ver­sity, con­tributed to the study and coau­thored this column.

See orig­i­nal post: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-muggah-haiti-count-20110712,0,7935632.story