In the media: The educated guesswork of estimating Darfur deaths

Fortunately our reports get (biiig) media attention from time to time. Several days ago I promised I was going to speak a little more about the things we’re doing here, so I’ll start linking some of these articles from now on. I’m gonna start with this one published yesterday by Agence France-Presse (AFP), titled “The educated guesswork of estimating Darfur deaths“:

When a top UN official released a new estimated death toll of 300,000 for Darfur this week, he reignited a lively debate about just how accurate such statistics are. [...] In an Op-Ed to the Financial Times in 2005, Professor Debarati Guha-Sapir, head of the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) and a professor of epidemiology at Louvain’s Catholic University in Brussels, warned that “sensational numbers do not help the Darfur cause.”

The full article is here.

Other selected articles from this year:

• Les bilans des morts de guerres, enjeux politiques (11 April 2008).

• Congo’s Death Rate Unchanged Since War Ended (23 January 2008).

Update: En français.

Update 2: Suffering lost in a numbers game — “While the UN and Khartoum disagree over exactly how many people have died in Darfur, the long-term outlook remains grim.”