And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

(Reuters) – New estimates of war deaths in 13 nations including Vietnam, Ethiopia and Bangladesh show that previous counts vastly understated the lives lost to war in the past half century, researchers said on Thursday. The new estimates relied on data from nationally representative population surveys done by the U.N. World Health Organization in these countries earlier this decade to calculate death tolls in wars waged from 1955 to 2002.

In most of the countries, this method pointed to much higher loss of life than broadly cited media estimates of the various war death counts had shown, the researchers said. For example, the method indicated 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the protracted fighting in Vietnam, mostly from 1955 to 1975, compared to previous estimates cited by the researchers of 2.1 million. Christopher Murray of the University of Washington said the findings, published in the British Medical Journal, suggest standard ways of tracking war deaths using media, eyewitness and combatant accounts tend to underestimate deaths, particularly in smaller wars. Ziad Obermeyer of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, another of the researchers, said accurate estimates of death tolls during wartime are extremely difficult to make. He also said the findings undercut the idea that the advent of modern weapons like “smart bombs” had made war less lethal.

But…

The study did not look at war dead in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Because that is a topical example of ruling elites and their media chums hiding corpses from view. Although also rather pathetically even people who claim anti-war positions still refuse to use Lancet or Orb figures, I think because they simply can’t get past their nationalistic ego of we can’t be as evil as those… others. Yeah, because no one ever told themselves that as they stuffed people into gas chambers…