Is your baby's sleep space safe? Are you sure?

The bad news: The New York Times has an article out on the dangers of baby sleep products ranging from the now infamous drop-side cribs to seemingly benign baby monitors.

The good news: The main focus of their article is on how the government is bringing more scrutiny to bear on these products, with the aim of saving baby lives.

New rules from multiple government regulatory agencies are showing a renewed interest in the safety of your baby’s stuff. While on the one hand that’s a good thing, it might also quickly become too much of a good thing. We don’t want the government closely policing how our babes fall asleep, but on the other hand we don’t want unscrupulous companies selling faulty or dangerous products to new parents.

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Even after huge breakthroughs in preventing SIDS like the Back To Sleep Campaign, 2,300 babies still die of SIDS every year. Now, new research may have uncovered a cause. Dr. Hannah Kinney of Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston and her fellow researchers examined brain tissue from the medulla of babies who died from SIDS and from other causes. The medulla is located at the base of the brain and regulates basic functions such as body temperature, breathing, blood pressure and heart rate.

They discovered that serotonin levels were 26 percent lower in tissue from babies who died of SIDS than those who died from other causes, as well as finding low levels of an enzyme needed to make serotonin. Continue reading »

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I think it’s been years since I’ve read a mainstream news story on cosleeping that didn’t make me want to start cursing at the screen. It has sometimes seemed like every couple weeks there is an over-simplified alarmist story in another regional daily, taken uncritically from a public health agency’s press materials. They usually go like this: “Babies sometimes die in adult beds! It must be the adult beds/adults who did it! Don’t sleep with your baby!” (Imagine if we said the same about cribs. . .)

So I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the report in the Houston Chronicle titled “‘Cosleeping’ Deaths Scrutinized“—and by the research it was based on.

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