Preventable infant deaths

Scripps Howard: In the United States each year there are 4,000 unexpected and — until now — unexplained infant deaths.

For more than 30 years the deaths tended to be attributed to the vague, catchall diagnosis called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, still the official determination for more than half of all infant deaths.

But a nine-month investigation by Scripps Howard News Service reporters Thomas Hargrove and Lee Bowman uncovered a harder and more painful truth: Most of these babies suffocated in completely preventable accidents.

“These infants die because they are accidentally smothered by parents or other children who sleep with them or because they are placed in dangerously overstuffed sofas or heavily blanketed adults beds,” they found. An infant is no match for an adult rolling over in a deep sleep due to exhaustion or alcohol or drugs.

Their conclusion — and the cure — may seem harsh but it is simple and straightforward. Babies rarely die while sleeping alone in a crib.

Accidential suffocations

The jurisdictions that made the breakthrough in determining that most SIDS deaths are in fact accidental suffocations have three critical essentials in common: Trained investigators are immediately dispatched to the scene. They fill out an exhaustive, standardized Center for Disease Control protocol, so that the pathologist begins the autopsy with a wealth of detail on the circumstances of the death. And the findings are reported to a local Child Death Review team of experts.

Approaching the problem is delicate because no official relishes the prospect of telling a mother and father that their baby died because a parent or older sibling rolled over on it or the infant couldn’t free itself from the fatal embrace of a pile of pillows.

Deborah Robinson, a specialist with the SIDS Foundation of Washington, who lost her own baby son, is deeply sympathetic but says, “I’ve come to believe that the sting of truth is much better than the fluff of deception.”