Gilbert Burnham has been interviewed (subscription required, copy here). Some extracts:
Why do you think your survey has been criticised?
These are unpleasant results, and they are associated with a war that has seriously divided the countries participating. Some people felt that we were not supporting the troops and were unpatriotic. I am not angry about that. As malicious as some of the hate mail I received is, I can see their point of view because I was in the military, in a combat unit in Korea during Vietnam. These soldiers in Iraq are volunteers, by and large, with good intentions, and they find themselves in a very difficult environment. As epidemiologists, we can produce the numbers, a good explanation for our methods and even a pretty strong statement on what they mean, but getting them accepted in policy circles and in people's thinking takes time and is often difficult.
**You've said you will release the raw data to scientific groups who apply, "scrubbed" of the neighbourhoods where it was collected to avoid identifying the interviewees. Will this help?
I don't know. Much of the criticism is based on unhappiness with the results. A repeat analysis won't turn the figure from 600,000 to 60,000. Our intent is to be more transparent. We believe we will see numbers that are fairly consistent with ours. I received a lot of supportive emails from people who admired the courage of the team so I think many people already believe our figure.
The interviewers wrote the principal streets in a cluster on pieces of paper and randomly selected one. They walked down that street, wrote down the surrounding residential streets and randomly picked one. Finally, they walked down the selected street, numbered the houses and used a random number table to pick one. That was our starting house, and the interviewers knocked on doors until they'd surveyed 40 households. It was more complicated than using GPS but not inferior: the results were very close to the GPS survey. The team took care to destroy the pieces of paper which could have identified households if interviewers were searched at checkpoints.
It does seem a bit odd that the major critics of the Burnham study just happen to be the same individuals who supported the invasion of Iraq.
But I'm sure that there's no correlation, and that these are people who are just interested in honest discussion as they were over weapons of mass destruction.