If you've been following the Darfur situation then you likely may well have heard that there's a new study out that finds that the number of folks who have died in Darfur has a floor near 200,000. This is relevant because there hasn't until now been a consensus on the number of Sudanese no longer alive as a result of the Darfur violence and as a result, the authors of the study assert, the press has resorted to using the ambiguous "tens of thousands" to pin a number on the situation.

John Hagen and Alberto Palloni, sociologists at Norwestern and the University of Wisconsin respectively, think that lower death estimates are flawed, in part, because they are based on the World Health Organization's rates of death amongst folks already living in displacement camps -- in other words, those more removed from the threat of violence than the broader population. So Hagan and Palloni attempted to refine the conclusions suggested by those broad WHO data sets by understanding them in a more targeted context created from data gathered by Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders in five actual West Darfur camps. That's where they came up with the minimum of 200,000 deceased number, along with a figure of one million additional people displaced by the violence. The Hagan/Palloni study appears in full in this month's issue of Science magazine, available to non-subscribers for the price of $10. But I just told you what's in it.