Story here; an excerpt:

An Iraqi doctor who made international headlines after stating that
civilian deaths in the Iraq war far exceeded officially reported
numbers is not being allowed to travel to North America to meet other
academics.

Riyadh Lafta and his colleagues have been trying for months to get a
U.S. travel visa so the doctor could speak at a medical conference at
the University of Washington today….

As an alternative, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.,
invited Lafta to deliver his lecture today, which was to have been
broadcast by video to the UW. But this week, the British government
denied him a four-hour transit visa for a stopover between the Middle
East and Canada.

Lafta, an epidemiologist, teaches at Al-Mustansiriya University
College of Medicine in Baghdad and co-wrote an October 2006 article
about Iraqi civilian deaths in The Lancet, a respected British medical
journal.

The UW’s School of Public Health and Community Medicine invited him
to talk about that study and elevated cancer levels, particularly
affecting children, in southern Iraq, said Amy Hagopian, an acting
assistant professor.

Hagopian, who is conducting research with Lafta, believes the Bush
administration is purposely blocking his travel to the United States.
"My hypothesis is the Bush administration was extremely threatened by
The Lancet study," she said….

"What we were going to hear about is a public health disaster in
Iraq," said Tim Takaro, an associate professor of health sciences at
Simon Fraser University.

Takaro, who also conducts research with Lafta, called the 2006 study
in The Lancet well-researched. He said the death estimate of nearly
655,000 Iraqi civilians is 10 times larger than other studies.

"The magnitude of that has been lost on the American people. Both
the British and U.S. governments have discounted these figures," he
said.

U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, who visited Iraq in 2002, wants to know more about cancer rates in Iraq and what Lafta has found.

"We end up with the State Department and God knows who putting their
foot on a guy from being able to attend a medical conference," he said.