Coming together to document mortality in conflict situations: proceedings of a symposium

We aimed to strengthen the scientific understanding of mortality estimation by reviewing progress across fields and building inter-disciplinary bridges. We report on the presentations and discussions here.The use of epidemiology in documenting the mortality experience of complex emergencies has become pervasive across humanitarian practice. Although used primarily as an operational tool, in recent years epidemiological practice has been placed front and centre in the larger debates over the deaths of civilians in Darfur and Iraq. Several other approaches have long been used to assess mortality in conflict settings, including forensic analyses of causes of death and investigations into the abuses of those who have perished.This overlap is not exactly a coincidence. Mortality is the ultimate indicator of human health and has wide-ranging implications on the understanding of the scale of a crisis on a population, the use of violence against civilians and culpability. But how can disciplines such as epidemiology, demography, statistics, law, human rights documentation and forensic science best coordinate with each other to describe the mortality experience of civilian populations? Each field has distinct objectives. There is a need to develop an understanding of these objectives to ultimately provide a coherent understanding of various numerical estimates and accounts. This will improve scientific communication and prevent confusion among the end users of these estimates.On November 6th and 7th, 2008, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) together with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) held a breakthrough symposium in Brussels, Belgium to open the dialogue between disciplines [1]. The main objectives were to strengthen the scientific basis of mortality documentation by drawing on recent progress in the disciplines of field epidemiology, demography, forensic science, statistical analysis and human rights investigation and to build bridge