Current tools for gauging the human cost of war seriously underestimate fatalities, say researchers who have developed a new method.
Estimating the death toll of wars is notoriously difficult. In 2002, researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, in Norway, used media and eyewitness reports to produce the first version of what is considered the most comprehensive record of 20th-century conflict.
However, Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle compared the Scandinavian estimates for 13 conflicts with estimates for the same wars from the World Health Organization…
