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Gilbert Burnham explains how his 2006 Johns Hopkins study arrived at a different number (650,000) than the UN did (34,000) in its estimate of Iraqis killed in the war.

The new UN estimate of 34,000 Iraqis killed in 2006 made headlines around the world, but, according to Burnham it's almost certainly far too low. The number, as The New York Times reported, was "the first attempt at hand-counting individual deaths for an entire year," and was based on information from "morgues, hospitals and municipal authorities across Iraq."

Leading a team of demographers from the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins University that used the most state-of-the art demographic techniques available, Burnham produced much higher numbers when they published their results in The Lancet in October 2006. Their estimate was that 650,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war as of July 2006: 600,000 from violence and 50,000 from other war-related causes.