Debate on cot death

doi:10.1136/bmj.320.7230.310

BMJ 2000;320:310 ( 29 January )

Letters

Debate on cot death

These deaths must be prevented without victimising parents

Standard system for postmortem examination and certification needs to be agreed

In 1994, 29% of suspicious deaths were officially recorded as due to sudden infant death syndrome

These deaths must be prevented without victimising parents

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Green's article is obviously intended to stir up the cot death establishment.¹ When cot death was introduced asa registerable cause of death, largely under the influence offorensic pathologists Bernard Knight of Cardiff and Francis Campsof London, some of us working in paediatric pathology were notin favour of this as we knew that it had many differentcauses.

We have known from the outset that a proportion of the deaths were technically filicide. In the early 1980s, when we publiclygave the figure of 10%, our findings were fiercely contested,but they were confirmed recently.² The recent studies by Meadowsand Southall et al showing parents deliberately and calculatinglyharming their infants apply to only a small proportion of thegroup of cot deaths that could be classified as infanticide. ³ ⁴ In our experience of hundreds of confidential inquiries into suddenunexpected deaths the most usual . . . [Full text of this article]

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This article has been cited by other articles:

Bacon, C J, Braithwaite, W. Y., Hey, E N (2007). Uncertainty in classification of repeat sudden unexpected infant deaths in Care of the Next Infant programme. BMJ 335: 129-131 [Full text]
Gornall, J. (2006). Was message of sudden infant death study misleading?. BMJ 333: 1165-1168 [Full text]

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