by Richard Garfield
 

To gain a more accurate picture of sanctions-related mortality in Iraq, the Fourth Freedom Forum commissioned public health specialist Richard Garfield of Columbia University to conduct an independent study. Garfield, a member of the initial Harvard Study Group that investigated the impact of sanctions in Iraq in 1991, has published studies on the health impact of sanctions against Cuba and Nicaragua.

Garfield uses innovative statistical methods and a variety of data sets compiled by international agencies and the Iraqi government to estimate the mortality rate in Iraq. His most reliable estimates were derived from a logistic regression model using a multiple imputation procedure. This model shows a likely estimate of 227,000 excess deaths among young children from August 1991 through March 1998, with little decline in mortality rates until after 1996. Since March 1998 the oil for food program has greatly increased access to essential supplies and the mortality rate has surely declined, but data are not yet available to estimate the magnitude of that decline. About one-quarter of these deaths were mainly associated with the Gulf war; most were primarily associated with sanctions. Garfield considers a number of causal aspects of the data as well as the impact on different sub-groups.

The estimates offered by Garfield are significantly lower than the claims presented by the most vocal critics of sanctions in Iraq. But even the more conservative estimates in Garfield's study confirm that hundreds of thousands of innocent children in Iraq have died prematurely and unnecessarily during this appalling humanitarian tragedy resulting from sanctions.

Richard Garfield is Bendixen Professor of Clinical International Nursing at Columbia University's School of Nursing.

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