After the Washington Post published a graphic about world cup deaths, showing relatively small numbers who died on construction for Beijing Olympics and Brazil World Cup, it went viral and was picked up by many news organisations without any verification.

The article claimed that 1,200 workers had died already in Qatar.

A journalist at the BBC has finally asked the questions - have 1,200 World Cup workers really died in Qatar? Where does that figure come from, and how was it calculated?

The BBC report states that it was first published in 2013 in a report by the International Trades Union Confederation (ITUC).

The ITUC went to the embassies of Nepal and India, two countries which are the source of many of the migrant workers who go to Qatar.

Those embassies had counted more than 400 deaths a year between them - a total of 1,239 deaths in the three years to the end of 2013.

But Nepal and India account for only about 60% of the estimated 1.4m migrant workers in Qatar, so the total number of migrant worker deaths is certain to be higher.

But this would still be only part of the story, as Qatar is host to large numbers of migrant workers from other countries, from Egypt to the Philippines.

These workers aren't all building World Cup facilities, however. In fact most of them aren't.

Another factor that needs to be taken into account is that, according to one estimate, a third of migrant workers in Qatar don't even work in construction.

The ITUC, though, is counting the deaths of workers in any line of work and from any cause, including road accidents and heart attacks.

Some would argue that it was a bad idea to hand the World Cup to a country where so many migrant workers are dying - even if some are dying on construction projects unconnected with the World Cup, and others are dying in unrelated sectors of the economy.

But the Indian Government says in a press release: "Considering the large size of our community, the number of deaths is quite normal."

The point officials are making is that there are about half a million Indian workers in Qatar, and about 250 deaths per year - and this, in their view, is not a cause for concern.

In fact, Indian government data suggests that back home in India you would expect a far higher proportion to die each year - not 250, but 1,000 in any group of 500,000 25-30-year-old men.

Even in the UK, an average of 300 for every half a million men in this age group die each year.

Read the full BBC story here.