Washblog

Iraqi Researcher Coming to Vancouver, Canada

As some of you may recall from an earlier Washblog diary, Dr. Riyahd Lafta was blocked earlier this year from appearing at conferences in both the United States and Canada. Dr. Lafta is an Iraqi researcher who had collaborated on the recent Lancet study that put the Iraqi death toll at about 655,000 since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Dr. Lafta has now been allowed to visit Canada, where he is meeting with researchers from the University of Washington and Simon Fraser University. On Friday, he'll be participating in a live interactive webcast. Below the fold are the details:

Dr. Riyadh Lafta
Al Mustansiriya University, Baghdad Iraq
"Death in Iraq"
Friday, July 20, 2007, 7:00 pm

Live interactive Webcast in Seattle:
UW School of Social Work, Room 305, 4101 15th Ave NE

In Person:
Wosk Center for Dialogue, 518 W. Hastings St. Vancouver BC, CANADA

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In October of 2006, the University of Washington invited Dr. Riyadh Lafta, an Iraqi physician, epidemiologist and health services planner to come to the UW to conclude a research project to document a suspected increase in childhood cancers in Southern Iraq. Dr. Lafta had been working with Drs. Amy Hagopian and Tim Takaro to access data from hospitals and physicians in Iraq--both in Baghdad and Basra, as the security situation in Iraq made it unsafe for any American researchers to do so. After many months of waiting, it became clear that the US State Dept. would not issue a visa to Dr. Lafta, although no official explanation was ever given. Dr. Lafta was, perhaps not coincidentally, one of the authors of two peer reviewed journal articles published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, that counted the number of Iraqi civilian deaths since the US-led invasion in March 2003.

Tim Takaro, a former UW Environmental Health faculty member currently on the Health Sciences faculty at Simon Fraser University, invited Dr. Lafta to come to Vancouver.  The Canadian government quickly issued him a visa. In April, he was to address a live audience at Simon Fraser, and we arranged to web-cast his talk to an audience in Kane Hall. Dr. Lafta never made the trip, because he was denied a transit visa for a 3 hour layover at London's Heathrow airport en route from the Middle East to Canada. At the last minute, Dr. Les Roberts, an American author of the two Lancet studies and lecturer at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, came to Seattle to substitute for Dr. Lafta. Dr. Roberts addressed an audience of more than 200 university and community members in Kane Hall and his talk was broadcast to an audience in Vancouver.

Since April, an airline began servicing a route that could fly Dr. Lafta directly from Jordan to Canada. Dr. Lafta arrived in Vancouver last week, and will speak live from the Wosk Center for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University and via two-way interactive video to an audience in Seattle. The Seattle talk will take place in Room 305 of the UW School of Social Work Building, 4101 15th Ave NE, at 7:00 pm on July 20th, next Friday.

Dr. Lafta is one of Iraq's most experienced health researchers, and one in a million who to this day is willing to work together on an American-led research project. His experience with the Iraqi health system and the health of the Iraqi population spans the period from the First Gulf War, though the UN sanction period (where he estimated child mortality resulting from the sanctions for the UN) to the present. He is currently on the faculty at Al Mustansiriya Medical School in Baghdad and involved in numerous research activities.

We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Lafta (virtually) to the University of Washington, and invite our colleagues and friends to join us on Friday July 20th, at 7:00 pm, in the large hall of the UW School of Social Work (address and map, above. flyer and news release attached).

Sincerely,

On behalf of the UW-Iraq Sister University Project
Ian Maki, MPH

by DWE on Tue Jul 17, 2007 at 07:14:16 PM PST

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