1 Little Word 1 Life Changing Impact

One topic that has had an impact in my life is the death of my youngest brother, Elijah, at age of three months.  It was a typical morning where my mother was getting ready for work at 5 am.  She checked on Elijah, changed his diaper, gave him a bottle, and he was falling off to sleep when my mother decided to take a shower.  After the ten minutes that she was in the shower, she came out to check on Elijah again and she immediately noticed his skin had turned and he was not breathing.  EMS was called and Elijah was pronounced dead at the hospital and the cause of death was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS.  In other words no doctor knew what caused my brother to stop breathing and pass away, and since he was under the age of six months the staff attributed the death to SIDS.  It will be 13 years in September since my family's loss.  My mother still has not been able to cope with this loss.  Angrily my mother tells people that this is not something that you can "get over" as they say.  This death played a huge role in how our family grew from then on.  

Since there is not much know about SIDS, it is extremely important to me that more research is done to discover possible causes and how to take preventative measures.  Sadly, many infants are passing away from a syndrome that has no signs or symptoms of hitting.  This syndrome alone is one of the reasons that I am nervous of having my own children.  

Here is the data from the SIDS website:

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is one of the leading causes of death among infants one month through one year of age in the United States. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) defines SIDS as the sudden death of an infant under one year of age which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation, including performance of a complete autopsy, examination of the death scene and review of the clinical history. SIDS is a diagnosis of exclusion, assigned only once all known and possible causes of death have been ruled out.

• SIDS claims the lives of almost 2,500 infants in the US each year - that's nearly 7 babies every day.
• SIDS is not caused by "baby shots."
• SIDS deaths occur unexpectedly and quickly to apparently healthy infants, usually during periods of sleep.
• SIDS is not caused by suffocation, choking, or smothering.
• SIDS is not caused by child abuse or neglect.
• SIDS is not contagious.
• SIDS occurs in families of all races and socioeconomic levels.
• SIDS cannot be predicted or prevented and can claim any baby, in spite of parents doing everything right.

http://www.cjsids.org/resource-center/what-is-sids-suid.html

American SIDS Website:  http://www.sids.org/

SIDS Statistics


International Statistics:

Compared to rates in other developed countries, the U.S. SIDS rate remains high. For example, in 2005, the U.S. rate ranked second highest (after New Zealand) among 13 countries in a research study by Fern Hauck and Kawai Tanabe. The lowest SIDS rates among these countries were in the Netherlands and Japan.

It is important to note that the age of inclusion for SIDS varies from country to country, with some countries defining SIDS as occurring from age 1 week to age 1 year, while others use a range from birth to age 1 year or another range. The authors state that it is likely to be a small effect because the number of SIDS deaths occurring in the first week of life and after age 1 year are very small.

Since SUID rates are not provided in these research findings, it is also unclear whether those rates may have increased as the SIDS rates declined (as has happened in the United States in recent years).

The decline in the SIDS rate in all of these countries is reflected in the overall decline in postneonatal mortality, and, as with the United States, higher rates of these declines occurred earlier in the risk-reduction campaigns in those respective countries.

http://www.sidscenter.org/Statistics.html

Since this has been such a deadly syndrome without any cause or much data on it, I would consider studying this at a future date.  SIDS is not thought about a lot, because it seems like it will never affect you.  It always happens to "those" people and you feel bad.  With the personal experience there is a drive to find out what caused my brother's death and what can be done to prevent it from happening to another family.