Injuries during infancy can result in death years later.

When Markeda Oyeyinka died on Monday, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled that her death was a homicide. She had suffered the effects of shaken baby syndrome.

Tragic to be sure, but the interesting part is that Oyeyinka was 17 years old. Continue reading »

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New evidence suggests not all cases of Shaken Baby Syndrome are caused by shaking.

Imagine having been sent to jail for shaking a child who later died, except you know you didn’t shake that child, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Then imagine — based on “fierce disagreement among doctors about the shaken-baby diagnosis” — that after 11 years in jail, your conviction was overturned, and you were set free.  Only by then, your husband had divorced you and taken your three daughters to live with him.

That frightening tale is the real life story of Audrey Edmunds, a former secretary who left her job to start an in-home daycare.  In the early 90s, one of her charges, 7-month-old Natalie Beard, “suddenly collapsed while drinking a bottle of milk” and was found to have “the triad of shaken-baby symptoms.”  Natalie died, and Edmunds was convicted of “first-degree reckless homicide.”

According to Emily Bazelon’s New York Times expose on the problems with the Shaken Baby Syndrome diagnosis, “A small but growing number of doctors warn that there can be alternate explanations — infections or bleeding disorders, for example — for the triad of symptoms associated with shaken-baby syndrome.”   Continue reading »

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Alexandra V. Tobias pleads guilty to murder

Most parents knows the frustration of a crying baby. Many even know the frustration of a crying baby who seemingly never stops. But mercifully few act on that frustration — and anger and hopelessness — in ways that harmful or, worst case, deadly.

Florida mother Alexandra V. Tobias wasn’t one of them. Today, she pleaded guilty to charges that she murdered her three-month-old son, whose crying interrupted Tobias’s FarmVille game on Facebook. Continue reading »

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Is everything we know about shaken baby syndrome wrong?

For years, mothers couldn’t turn around without hearing about shaken baby syndrome. I remember being compelled to watch a video about it and sign a form saying that I understood the dangers before being allowed to leave the hospital after giving birth to my son.

Recently, though, the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome has come under sharp scrutiny. As DePaul University law professor Debrah Tuerkheimer writes in an op-ed in Tuesday’s New York Times:

For the past 30 years, doctors have diagnosed the syndrome on the basis of three key symptoms known as the “triad”: retinal hemorrhages, bleeding around the brain and brain swelling. The presence of these three signs (and sometimes just one or two of them) has long been assumed to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the person who was last taking care of the baby shook him so forcefully as to fatally injure his brain.

But closer scrutiny of the body of research that is said to support the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome has revealed methodological shortcomings. Scientists are now willing to accept that the symptoms once equated with shaking can be caused in other ways. Indeed, studies of infants’ brains using magnetic resonance imaging have revealed that triad symptoms sometimes exist in infants who have not suffered injuries caused by abuse. Bleeding in the brain can have many causes, including a fall, an infection, an illness like sickle-cell anemia or birth trauma.

Tuerkheimer points out that hundreds of people — mothers, fathers and babysitters among them — are currently serving time in prison because they have been accused of causing shaken baby syndrome based on evidence that, once believed to be convincing, has now become suspect. Continue reading »

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Babies cry.  They keep you up all night, sometimes for years.  The less money you have, the worse those sleepless days feel.  You can’t afford a trip to the spa, or to pay a babysitter while you enjoy a relaxing night out.  Being poor can make you feel trapped, and the stress of the recession has caused more people to snap and shake their children, according to research presented this weekend at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

The study is co-authored by Rachel Berger, a child abuse specialist at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and Philip Scribano of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, OH.  They traced 511 cases of shaken baby syndrome from 2004-2009 at hospitals in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Seattle and Columbus and found that two-thirds involved children less than 12 months old.  Additionally, two-thirds of the infants were admitted to intensive care and 16% died.  “Nearly 90% of the children were covered by Medicaid,” according to USA Today.  So, is child abuse related to unemployment rates? Continue reading »

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Thank you, Double X for pointing us toward a fascinating article in Reason magazine about changes in how the medical community views so-called “shaken baby syndrome.” Despite hundreds of convictions each year — many using “expert testimony” — researchers, doctors and legal experts have lately been asking whether it is even possible to shake a baby to death.

For a long time, the death of any baby that showed these three symptoms — bleeding at the back of the eye, bleeding in the protective area of the brain, and brain swelling — was thought to be caused by having been vigorously shaken by a caretaker. Almost everybody who purported to know anything about SBS thought  those three symptoms could only occur in an infant who had been shaken with a force equivalent to a fall from a three-story window or a car going between 25 and 40 mph.

However! Continue reading »

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I’ll admit that when I saw the Onoin News Network video for the “BabySafe Ball” (“New BabySafe Ball Makes Shaking Your Infant Guilt and Injury Free!”) I wasn’t sure it was funny. I’m still not.

It felt like it wanted to be, in good old outrageous, offensive Onion style, but I think the problem was it didn’t have a good target to make fun of. Caregivers who get to the point of wanting to shake their babies? That’s all of us at some point. Not much of a point to make. People who actually do? Not so funny. Over-the-top baby safety devices? It’s an area ripe for satire, but this doesn’t quite hit home—usually those are protecting kids from something not all that likely or dangerous, not encouraging you to do something awful by making it supposedly safe.

Continue reading »

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