The 2003 Iraq War and Avoidable Death Toll

摘要

During and after disasters, the human deaths become numbers in columns for epidemiologists to discover and statisticians to analyse. In peacetime, accurate and timely mortality data serve as an important tool in population forecasting, as indicators of a population's welfare, and for planning and developing health services and programmes and evaluating them [1]–[3]. In humanitarian crises (natural and man-made), such information serves a different purpose, mainly to evaluate the severity of the crisis, both at its onset and as it evolves over time [4]. The research article by Amy Hagopian and colleagues [5] in this week's issue of PLOS Medicine, which provides the most recent excess mortality estimates for the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation, is an example of the latter.