Wanganui mayor Michael Laws has joined the debate about parents sharing beds with babies, calling a warning by the Whanganui District Health Board "little more than politically correct nonsense".
A media release from the health board yesterday warned against parents sharing beds with children if they had been drinking, taking drugs or certain medicines or were excessively tired, or if the mother smoked during pregnancy.
Child and youth mortality review committee chairman Dr Nick Baker said there was a 10-fold increase in the risk of cot death or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Sids) in infants under 3 months of age sharing their parents' bed, even in infants whose parents did not smoke, drink or take drugs.
Mr Laws, a member of the health board, dissociated himself from the media release, and said it flew in the face of different cultures and sought to stop bonding between mother and child.
"This is flim-flam aimed at a tiny minority of parents who engage in risky and anti-social activities.
"Because some of them - drugged and/or drunk - suffocate their children by rolling on them while asleep - and no one can bring themselves to admit such ... the advice is then given to all mums and parents to desist. It is a nonsense."
Mr Laws equated the advice to the drinking-while-pregnant issue. "The occasional glass of wine with your meal will not harm your unborn child. So it is with bedsharing. It is a practice that has not killed kids for centuries.
"But health authorities are seeking to scare all mums and parents with this alarmist gibberish."
In the board's media release, Wanganui paediatrician Dr David Montgomery said the city had the highest death rate in the country of infants between the ages of 4 weeks and 1 year, and advice on how to prevent cot death should not be ignored.
Wanganui mothers and groups including the La Leche League have challenged the advice about bedsharing.
Wellington coroner Garry Evans, giving his preliminary findings into the deaths of four babies, said parents sharing beds with babies would figure in his findings to be issued next year.
Following Mr Evans' inquest, Plunket released a list of ways parents could protect their babies from Sids.
The organisation said if parents insisted on having their babies in their bed, they should ensure the adults had not been using alcohol or drugs and were not particularly tired, there was no bedding covering the baby's face and it could not be wedged between or under others.
"The risks of bedsharing are greater for premature and low birth weight babies and those who have been exposed to smoke," Plunket said.
Auckland University professor of child health research Ed Mitchell said bedsharing absolutely increased risk of babies dying from Sids.
He said the message to not share beds was included in advice to parents on the Ministry of Health website, but the message was being delivered inconsistently.
A number of breastfeeding advocates ... were recommending bedsharing to improve breastfeeding rates."
There has been a call for more consistent messages about the dangers of bedsharing with babies after an inquest into the deaths of seven babies yesterday.
Auckland University professor of child health research Evan Mitchell said bedsharing absolutely increased risk of babies dying from sudden infant death syndrome (Sids).
"About 50 per cent of the deaths are occurring in a bedsharing situations," he told Radio New Zealand.
Prof Mitchell's comments follow a Wellington coroner's inquest yesterday into the deaths of seven babies, including four who died while sharing a bed with others.
Wellington coroner Garry Evans reserved his findings until the New Year but made no secret of his dissatisfaction that the practice of co-sleeping, and other "unsafe" sleeping practices, had not been discouraged enough.
Prof Mitchell said the message to not share beds was included in advice to parents on the Ministry of Health website.
"But the message is being delivered very inconsistently," he said.
"There are a number of breastfeeding advocates ...who are recommending bedsharing to improve breastfeeding rates. "
There were several initiatives that provided an alternative to bedsharing.
"At the moment we don't know of any way of doing bedsharing completely safely - having the cot right up close to the bed so the baby's in close contact proximity, making breastfeeding easy, must surely be the right way to go."
Paediatrician Dawn Elder, who has studied unexplained baby deaths in the Wellington region over the last 10 years, also said more information was needed.
"Certainly there is information out there, but there isn't enough," she said.
"How do we look at getting more information to families in different ways. Sometimes the pamphlet isn't appropriate for every family out there, so how do we do that better."
Not a witch-hunt
Coroner Garry Evans told parents at the inquest yesterday that they deserved more than just a sudden infant death syndrome diagnosis.
"This is not a witch-hunt," he told each family as, one by one, young mothers and fathers took the witness stand to tell the story of their baby's tragic deaths.
"We don't blame you for your loved one's death."
Officials and media sobbed as grieving mothers took the witness stand to tell the story of their babies' last hours.
Some mothers wore vague, blank expressions and had obviously retreated into themselves to cope. Others, like Zantana Meihana, 19, were overwhelmed with emotion, her raw sobs causing all but the most stoic to weep with her.
All mothers were young. All were Maori. All either slept with their babies or had slept them on their tummies or on pillows where they had been found face down or partly covered in a blanket. Each had stories about how their babies had been lovingly wrapped, tucked into bed, fed and kissed before they'd woken to find them dead several hours later.
"Do you think," Mr Evans asked Ms Meihana, "that you could have rolled on to baby in the night?"
"I think I did!" she moaned before collapsing into her father Frank. More than a year after she had woken to find one-month-old Pro Junior lifeless next to her, Ms Meihana could barely shuffle to the witness stand under the weight of sadness.
Mr Meihana said the family had been profoundly affected by the death. They feared they'd be judged.
"At the time, the Kahui twins thing was going on," the large, dreadlocked man told the coroner, his voice breaking into his tears. "I did not want any of that coming on to my family."
The court also heard about the deaths of Yozahliyah Taipeti, Tristan Rapata-Warbrick, Nephi Tito-George, Reipai Harris, Indiah Hawkins and Yozahne Aki-Hosay.
Mr Evans told the families that although the inquests were taxing they deserved more than a diagnosis under the "veil" of sudden infant death syndrome.
"As if [Sids] was some monster gobbling up their little children," he said. Parents needed to know what had really gone wrong.
While parents were warned that co-sleeping could be dangerous, especially when the parent was drunk, drugged or overweight, in some cases yesterday none of those factors was present.
Using a fan to circulate air seemed to lower the risk of sudden infant death syndrome in a study of nearly 500 babies, researchers reported Monday. Placing babies on their backs to sleep is the best advice for preventing SIDS, a still mysterious cause of death.
Experts also recommend a firm mattress, removing toys and pillows from cribs, and keeping infants from getting too warm.
Such practices helped slash U.S. SIDS deaths by more than half over a decade to about 2,100 in 2003. But SIDS remains the leading cause of death in infants ages one month to one year.
"The baby's sleeping environment really matters," said study senior author Dr. De-Kun Li of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, Calif. "This seems to suggest that by improving room ventilation we can further reduce risk."
SIDS is the sudden death of an otherwise healthy infant that can't be attributed to any other cause. These babies may have brain abnormalities that prevent them from gasping and waking when they don't get enough oxygen.
The new study, published in October's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, offers another way to make sure babies get enough air.
More research is needed, said Dr. Fern Hauck of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, but she said that because fan use is in line with theories, it may be worth considering.
"This is the first study that we know of that has looked at this issue," said Hauck, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics SIDS task force.
Researchers interviewed mothers of 185 infants who died from SIDS and mothers of 312 infants of similar race and age. Moms answered dozens of questions about their baby's sleeping environment.
Researchers took into account other risk factors and found that fan use was associated with a 72 percent lower risk of SIDS. Only 3 percent of the babies who died had a fan on in the room during their last sleep, the mothers reported. That compared to 12 percent of the babies who lived.
Using a fan reduced risk most for babies in poor sleeping environments.
The study involved infants in 11 California counties. It was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
AP
Babies who die from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) are often found with their heads covered by bedding, and now new research suggests that this covering usually precedes death and may, in fact, be causally related.
This finding supports current recommendations to avoid head covering as a means of reducing the risk of SIDS, lead author Dr. Edwin A. Mitchell, from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and colleagues note in the June issue of Pediatrics.
They point out that in UK guidelines, a "feet to foot" approach (placing the infant's feet at the foot of the cot) is recommended as a strategy to prevent the infant from sliding underneath the bedding. Despite this recommendation, it was unclear if head covering, which is seen in roughly 25% of SIDS cases, contributed to death or if it was an agonal event, according to the report.
To answer this question, the researchers analyzed data from 393 SIDS cases in the New Zealand Cot Death Study (1987 to 1990) and from 333 cases in a German SIDS case-control study (1998 to 2001).
Overall, 15.6% of infants in the New Zealand study and 28.1% in the German study had their heads covered, the report indicates.
Infants whose heads were covered were often very sweaty, the researchers found, which suggests that the covering occurred before death. Older infants were more likely than younger ones to have their head covered, which likely reflects motor development.
In both studies, head covering correlated with the occurrence and severity of thymic petechiae. By contrast, head covering was not associated with the position the child was placed to sleep, or with the position the child was found in at death.
While the new findings support SIDS prevention strategies, research is "urgently" needed on how best to prevent head covering, the authors conclude.
Ramaz Mitaishvili