A government in the middle of a bloody and multi-sided civil war can’t keep good records of the dead.

Or of the wounded.

Many wounded don’t risk the hospitals.

A media that has suffered an extraordinary casualty rates of its own can’t cover the war or its casualties effectively.

Targeted attacks having driven out almost all foreign service organization, no one is responding to the crisis.

The IBC and other organizations try to downplay reports that the situation is worse than they think.

Again, which part of this is unimaginable?

IBC.com

Iraq Body Count Press Release 16 October 2006
Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates
Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda, and Josh Dougherty
Summary

A new study has been released by the Lancet medical journal estimating over 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq. The Iraqi mortality estimates published in the Lancet in October 2006 imply, among other things, that:

1. On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;
2. Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;
3. Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;
4. Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;
5. The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive “Shock and Awe” invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.

If these assertions are true, they further imply:

* incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;
* bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;
* the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;
* an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.

In the light of such extreme and improbable implications, a rational alternative conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from unrepresentative data. In addition, totals of the magnitude generated by this study are unnecessary to brand the invasion and occupation of Iraq a human and strategic tragedy.

I believe that you are probably comparing a rate calculated by dividing births by total female population to a rate that is births divided by female population between 16 and 40 years of age. That the rough calculation you derived from the study numbers (number of births in study divided by number of female members of households, including children and elderly) is off by 33% would be consistent with this difference.

Also, the chance that the study authors didn’t notice the anomaly you report or didn’t consider it worth trying to explain or account for seems very small. The chance that the peer reviewers for this paper didn’t notice it or ask for an explanation seems even smaller.