Analysis: Counting the dead

In times of war, accurate figures on the civilian death toll are almost always hard to come by. With few exceptions, demographers and epidemiologists have not applied their expertise to making rigorous, credible estimates of civilian mortality and morbidity.

Sometimes, a lack of professional freedom prevents those who may be most familiar with the data -- for example, analysts whose livelihoods depend on the governments involved in the conflict -- from using their expertise for purposes that could be politically damaging.

But there are other challenges as well. Isolating the conflict's impact from that of other interventions (economic sanctions, for example) may be impossible. Moreover, the high-quality population data needed for credible estimates may not be available because of their "sensitive nature," because they never have been collected (sometimes the case in developing nations) or because refugee movements have made data obsolete. As a result, the degree of uncertainty in such estimates may be unacceptably high, making them of little real worth.

Read the rest at the Taipei Times