To the editor:

A study reported last week in “The Lancet'” the prestigious British medical journal, gives some measure of the effects of war and occupation in Iraq. The study was designed by a team from Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Al-Mustansiriya University of Baghdad.

Last September, a team of Iraqis, most of whom were physicians, surveyed 988 households carefully selected to be representative of the total population. They compared the number of people dying in the 18 months after the invasion to those dying in the preceding 18 months. They found a 50 percent increase in deaths, not counting Fallujah, where the death rate was dramatically higher than that.

The cause, of course, was violence — chiefly American air attacks but also newborn deaths and other deaths at home because people were afraid to travel to a hospital. The study did not estimate the number of deaths due to car bombs and similar violence. These clearly have become more numerous in recent months. Coalition fatalities numbered 1,124 at last count.

More than four times more children under the age of 15 died after the invasion than in the same period of time before. The team’s conservative estimate of total excess deaths was 98,000 — 29 percent of them women, children and elderly. If this occurred in the United States, the comparable number of excess deaths would be 1.2 million — 350,000 of them women, children and elderly.

Dr. Joe Douglas,

Lawrence