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Parents: Never sleep with infant
By WILLIAM K. ALCORN
YOUNGSTOWN
Babies who are suffocating take only a few seconds to a minute to become unconscious.
At that point, they can’t cry out or struggle.
Three minutes later, they are dead.
“I have heard mothers that lost a child to suffocation while sleeping with them say they thought they would hear their child cry out if there was a problem; or that they would never fall asleep with them in bed,” said Dr. Joseph Ohr, forensic pathologist with the Mahoning County coroner’s office.
But it doesn’t take an adult rolling over on a child to cause suffocation, which Dr. Ohr said is fairly rare in his experience.
An adult can, while sleeping, unknowingly fling out an arm or leg across a baby’s face and block their nose and mouth.
Infant suffocation can occur when a baby is lying face down on its mother’s stomach or chest with its nose and mouth pressed against its mother’s breast or arm or other soft tissue. Unable to move, the baby quickly can become unconscious and die, he said.
The stark message, said Dr. Ohr, is “never, ever sleep with your baby.”
That also is the focus of the Mahoning County Child Fatality Review Board, which tracks the number of children who die annually in the county.
The review board reported that in 2008, the latest annual statistics available, 36 children from infant to age 18 died in the county.
Five of the 36 were infants who died of either Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or were accidentally suffocated in an unsafe sleep environment.
Sleep-related deaths have accounted for 11 percent, or 1 in 9, infant deaths in the county since 2000, according to the report.
There is a culture, passed from mother to daughter, of putting children in bed with adults. There also is misleading information on the Internet and from the community that says co-sleeping is safe, Dr. Ohr said.
“I’ve found it in black and European and American cultures, rich and poor. It is difficult to overcome. I’m a man, so I don’t fully understand what women go through. But it is a tradition that is never OK,” said Dr. Ohr, a native of Youngstown who returned to the area a year ago.
“We know that the deaths of many of these children were preventable,” said Matthew Stefanak, Mahoning County District Board of Health Commissioner and Infant Fatality Review Board chairman.
“Basically, we’re harping on the same theme we’ve addressed several times in the past — SIDS and unsafe sleep environment-related deaths are almost entirely preventable,” Stefanak said.
“We’re pushing the ‘ABC’ message — babies should sleep alone, on their back and in a safe crib,” he said.
The board has had good collaboration with hospitals in educating resident doctors and maternity nurses. Childbirth is the time to reinforce the message,” Stefanak said.
“We try to educate our resident physicians, nurses and family-practice-nurse educator to educate parents. Sleep-environment deaths are preventable, so we need to educate all of our parents,” said Dr. Lisa N. Weiss, program director for family medicine for Forum Health Northside Medical Center.
The message about infants’ being put to sleep on their backs is out there, and because of that, crib deaths decreased by 50 percent, said Dr. Elena M. Rossi, chairwoman of pediatrics at St. Elizabeth Health Center and associate chairwoman of pediatrics for Akron Children’s Hospital.
With SIDS deaths, the suspicion is that the babies who sleep on their stomachs breathe their own carbon dioxide. But there is no proof. It’s really only a relationship. But, she said, more babies’ sleeping on their backs resulted in fewer babies dying in their cribs.
The decline in the number of crib deaths is a real trend, but Dr. Rossi said she is disheartened by the continued sleep-environment infant deaths because they are preventable.
The safest picture of a sleeping baby is one alone on its back, with nothing in the crib, in the same room with its caregiver, no smoke in the environment, and sucking on a pacifier, Dr. Rossi said.