Scripps Howard Editorial: A Better Way to Track SIDS, Stillbirths
Monday, June 23, 2008
Printable FormatScripps News
The efforts of advocacy groups, backed by a groundbreaking Scripps Howard News Service investigation, paid off this month when Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., introduced a bill calling for uniform national standards for reporting and investigating stillbirths and sudden infant deaths.
Each year, 4,500 babies die suddenly and unexpectedly in their first year and 25,000 suffer stillbirths. It's a heartbreaking problem but one that has been maddeningly elusive to deal with because jurisdictions vary so widely in how they handle them.
Obama's legislation would go a long way toward addressing the issues raised by SHNS reporters Thomas Hargrove and Lee Bowman in a nine-month investigation that found chaotic and wildly varying methods used to record and investigate infant deaths. What seemed a promising reduction in SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, turned out on investigation to be more a matter of how the deaths were classified.
Where states and localities adopted standard protocols of reporting and investigation, backed by professional review panels, they found that most SIDS deaths were due to accidental suffocation, usually from inappropriate adult bedding or sleeping with another person.
The Obama bill would have the Centers for Disease Control and other federal health agencies set up surveillance and monitoring systems, establish standardized investigation and review protocols and collect standardized information about medical, environmental, social and genetic factors relating to sudden infant deaths. Importantly, it would encourage and support multidisciplinary infant death review panels that play a critical oversight role.
The bill would establish similar standardized criteria for reporting and classifying stillbirths and set up a national case registry to collect and analyze that data.
The bill is backed by an array of groups involved in the prevention of stillbirths and sudden infant deaths and by a task force of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The reality of the legislative calendar is such that Congress is unlikely to take up the bill this year but it should be a priority next year.