The New Zealand experience: how smoking affects SIDS rates. (Special Issue).

Publication: Mothering

Publication Date: 01-SEP-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 Mothering Magazine

New Zealand is a small country--the size of England--with a population of just over four million, of which 15 percent are indigenous Maori. In the 1980s we had the unenviable reputation of having one of the highest rates of infant death in the Western world. The majority of the excess of deaths (compared to other countries)were recorded as being due infant death syndrome (SIDS). (1)

**********

To find out what we were going wrong, a research group from different parts of the country, including most of the authors of this article, carried out the New Zealand National SIDS Study (1987-1990), which compared infant care practices of parents of 465 babies who died of SIDs with parents of 1,800 who did not. Our questions were deliberately designed to focus on parental actions that were relatively common and that also could be changed. Among other results, (2-20) we found that bedsharing was a risk, but sharing a room (not a bed) was protective. To our surprise, the use of a dummy (pacifier) was a protective factor.

Most important was strong evidence that babies sleeping on their fronts or sides were at much higher risk of dying than those placed on their backs. With supporting evidence coming out of the Netherlands at the same time, we launched a national campaign telling parents that babies should be put to sleep on their backs, that smoking increased the risk of sudden death, and that breastfeeding decreased this risk. The campaign had the effect of halving the numbers of SIDS deaths in New Zealand within a year. Subsequently we discovered that almost...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.