Abstract
The death of a child is probably the most traumatic event any parent can experience. This tragedy is made worse if the child dies in its sleep, apparently for no reason. Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) inevitably strikes horror into parents' hearts; it usually happens at night and occurs in complete silence—there is no fight for life or breath to warn parents that something is horribly wrong. Indeed, infants who have died of SIDS look rather peaceful, which makes it even worse for parents who wake up in the morning to find their child dead. > SIDS […] continues to thwart the efforts of scientists and physicians to prevent it, or at least to identify those children who are at risk SIDS is not only a traumatic and devastating event for parents and medical examiners, it is also a cause of death that continues to thwart the efforts of scientists and physicians to prevent it, or at least to identify those children who are at risk. Indeed, the term SIDS was coined to provide a convenient diagnosis for a medical examiner to label an otherwise unexplainable death. It is only during the past few years that scientists and epidemiologists have been able to identify environmental and metabolic factors that combine to cause SIDS. In particular, epidemiological research has identified some important environmental risk factors—notably when children sleep on their stomachs or under heavy blankets, or whether the parents smoke. One resulting recommendation is to encourage parents to turn infants on their backs; the ‘Back to Sleep’ campaign that started in 1994 in the USA and similar educational campaigns in other countries have led to a considerable drop in SIDS deaths. Nevertheless, the prevalence of SIDS is still approximately 0.5% in the USA, or 50 deaths per 100,000 live births, and it …