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COPYRIGHT 2002 Mothering Magazine
Several strong recommendations have been made recently by different groups concerning the safest or most appropriate sleeping arrangements for infants in Western society. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission, basing its information on reports of child deaths in adult beds, has advised parents against taking their baby into bed with them. Unfortunately, the study upon which this recommendation is based did not include a control group; thus, while individual cases were described in which accidental asphyxia was adduced from the circumstances of death, no population data were collected to allow an assessment of actual risk.
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In the UK, the Sudden Unexpected Deaths in Infancy study (SUDI), carried out as part of the Confidential Enquiry into Stillbirths and Deaths in Infancy (CESDI), was a population-based case-control study of all sudden unexpected deaths of infants from 7 to 365 days of age, in five regions of England. (1,2,3,4) It was the largest such study yet conducted and included all unexpected infant deaths occurring over a three-year period from a population of 470,000 births. The families of infants who died were contacted as soon as possible after the death (usually within three or four days), and a nurse-researcher interviewed the parents to collect detailed information on the family background and medical, social, economic, and environmental factors; in all, the database included more than...
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