In the U.S., experts have revealed that there has been an increase in accidental suffocation which leads to death eventually among infants in their first 8 months who can quickly move away from beddings or sleeping parents.
According to government analysis, everyday scenarios that lead to accidental suffocation are bed or blanket sharing with parents or unsafe sleeping habits.
Though for more than 30 years, American Academy of Pediatrics in association with the U.S. government has lunch campaign to wage war against unsafe-sleeping habits such as “back to sleep” which encourage mothers to put their infant to sleep while laying on their back so has to prevent accidental suffocations, sudden death syndrome in infant or strangulations.
Despite all this campaign, there has been an increase in accidental suffocation in infants due to the increase in bed sharing with parent. According to experts, the death tolls of infants who died due to bed related accidental suffocation has increased from 6 deaths per 100,000 infants in 1999 to 23 in 100,000 infant deaths in 2015.
According to a study released on Monday in Pediatrics, among 250 suffocation leading to death in infant, around 70 percent are due to beddings accessories such as pillows and blankets blocking their airways while on an adult bed. Twenty percent of such deaths are due to someone in bed with them moving on top of them or against them and about 12 percent due to their faces been impacted against the mattress or wall.
The study was authored by Alexa Erck Lambert a CDC researcher as the lead author and Dr. Fern Hauck, an expert in infant deaths in the University of Virginia as a co-author. Dr. Fern Hauck, one of the authors, believes these deaths are preventable which he termed the essential point of the whole study.
To make the study more detailed than all other studies previously conducted on similar topics, the authors used a data from Centers for Disease Control and prevention in the period of 2011-2014 of death registry in 10 states which revealed that there had been little change in unsafe sleeping practice in recent years.
