SIDS remembered
Since Covid, I have become completely disillusioned with the American Health System. Recently, I heard a report that evoked a memory I haven’t had in decades. As a young man I worked with an older white gentleman whom I liked and respected. One day he experienced a family tragedy that lingered in my consciousness until this day.
One day co-worker and his wife were baby-sitting their first-born infant grandchild, but sometime that night the baby inexplicably stopped breathing and died in his crib. It was a medical mystery, and the health professionals label the death as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Close friends of my coworker say he was never the same man and retired soon after. The remorse and guilt he must have borne had to have been overwhelming. That tragedy hit me in a place I never expected. For the first time I understood the fragility of life. When I had my own children, not a night passed when I wasn’t reminded of the possibility of SIDS lingering in the back of my mind.
Some may remember the medical mystery of SIDS was a major news story in the 70’s and 80’s. Despite never finding conclusive evidence as to the cause of SIDs it was attributed to the bedtime positioning of infants. Parents were advised to position infants on the stomach or side, never on soft bedding, pillows, or loose blankets in the crib, even blaming exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke. These were educated guesses at best.
Today, In the United States, about 1,500 infants die from SIDS each year, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control In 2022, there were 1,529 deaths attrib uted to SIDS. Until this day it remains a medical mystery, until now. In a recent groundbreaking statistical analysis, it was revealed that 78% of SIDS cases. occurred in infants vaccinated while still in the hospitals as opposed to unvaccinated babies vaccinated later in life.
One might ask why it took so long to uncover the potential cause of SIDS. The answer is illustrated when a Louisiana legislator took interest in the study and proposed mandating the medical examiners to include any vaccine records with final death certifi cate of babies who died from SIDS. The legislation failed because of intense objection from the medical examiners themselves.