October 9, 2008
Walker-Ames Lecture looks at media coverage of Iraqi deaths
By Bobbi Nodell
News & Community Relations
Les Roberts, who has been quoted widely in the media about the underreporting of Iraqi death statistics, will speak on “U.S. Press Inability to Report Post-invasion Civilian Deaths in Iraq.” at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 22, in 130 Kane as part of his weeklong visit to UW. The lecture is part of the Walker-Ames Lecture Series. He will be introduced by Congressman Jim McDermott (D-Wash), who is also a physician.
Roberts, who has a doctoral degree in environmental engineering from John’s Hopkins University and a master’s in public health from Tulane University, was a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and now heads the program on forced migration and health at Columbia University.
He is the principal researcher in a series of public health surveys on mortality among Iraqi citizens whose controversial results have been published in the British journal The Lancet in 2004 and 2006.
Roberts’ first study, in conjunction with scientists from Al-Mustansirya University in Baghdad and Columbia University in New York, came out a week before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, estimating about 100,000 excess deaths or more based on “conservative assumptions.”
At the time, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw placed the Iraqi death toll at 15,000 and The Brookings Institution estimates ranged from 10,000 to 27,000.
In October 2006, an expanded follow-up study gave an estimate of 654,965 deaths.
Some critics attacked the studies’ methodology, a household survey, as inadequate and Roberts was accused of allowing his personal views to corrupt his findings.
But Amy Hagopian, the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine faculty member who nominated him for the Walker Ames lectureship, said Roberts is her “public health hero.”
“I first became convinced of this when listening to him describe the harrowing challenges his team faced when they conducted their study in Iraq — including the arrest of two door-to-door surveyors and trying to find “missing” homes in Fallujah that had been destroyed by the U.S. invasion.”
Hagopian said Roberts is not only willing to go to war zones to collect data, but he’s also willing to do an even more dangerous thing for an academic — do battle with the media and politicians who attack his work.
In addition to the Walker-Ames Lecture, Roberts will be teaching a series of three sold-out workshops on campus:
Workshop 1: “Investigational Methods in Humanitarian Emergencies,” with a case study on measuring mortality in Zimbabwe subsequent to a national policy to bulldoze slums.
Workshop 2: “Epidemiological Methods for Measuring Human Rights Abuse,” with a case study on measuring rape in conflict settings.
Workshop 3: “Water and Sanitation in Complex Emergencies.”
Roberts’ visit is being sponsored by several UW groups, including the Department of Global Health, the Graduate School, the Department of Technical Communication, the Interdisciplinary Program on Humanitarian Relief, the School of Law, the Department of Civil Engineering, the Evans School of Public Affairs, and the Department of Environmental Health.
For more information on Roberts’ visit, including his schedule and links to publications and his biography, go to http://staff.washington.edu/hohl/index.shtml.
In related news, a nationally touring photo exhibit, “Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq,” is on display at Odegaard Undergraduate Library from Sept. 20-Dec. 6, documenting the impact of the war in Iraq. Two of the photojournalists will be on hand for a book signing 1 p.m. Oct. 11 at the UW Book Store and will be giving a lecture the next day (Oct. 12) from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Kane Hall. For more information, go to www.unembedded.net.
