Established methods for estimating the human cost of war typically underestimate by a factor of three, say researchers who have developed a more accurate method for assessing fatalities.

Accurately estimating the death toll from wars is notoriously difficult, and usually depends on a mixture of eyewitness reports and media coverage.

A database of such estimates covering the entire 20th century is kept by Uppsala University and the Peace Research Institute in Norway. However a new study suggests that for some periods the deaths recorded could have been up to three times higher.

Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington, looked at death toll estimates gathered by the World Health Organization for selected countries.

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The WHO figures are extrapolated from telephone interviews in which individuals are asked about family members who have died and are considered more accurate.

Iraq reduction

In most cases, the WHO surveys recorded much higher numbers of casualties than the Norwegian database. For example, the database records just over 2 million war deaths in Vietnam between 1955 and 2002, mainly due to the war with the US in 1965. But the WHO figures suggest twice as many people died.

When WHO survey results from another 12 countries were compared with the Norwegian figures, the WHO numbers come out on average three times higher.

If that correction is applied to the whole Norwegian database, the annual death total from wars between 1985 and 1994, the last period that the researchers looked at, is estimated at 378,000.

But the method suggests that one recent controversial mortality figure may be an over estimate. A survey published in 2006 put the death toll from the current Iraq conflict at over 600,000 – four times as high as previous studies had found.

But, based on eyewitness reports from the country and the revised method for correcting this figure, Obermeyer calculates that 184,000 people have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

Journal reference: British