Jan, This is not a case of "safe until PROVEN unsafe". I think the focus for child-care professionals should be "unsafe until PROVEN safe". I doubt the numbers you want are available. Of the last three SIDS deaths I know of in our practice, 2 were co-sleeping in the adult bed with no alchohol, drugs, etc and 1 was asleep on the mother's chest (Christmas morning). Since we cannot always control for alcohol, prone sleeping, obesity in either parent, cigarette smoking, excessive somnolence, antihistamine use, sleeping aids, melatonin use, family history of narcolepsy, etc., we need to cut out all the BS and go for the essentials: Babies die more frequently in adult beds than alone & on their backs. Period. I do not have an office large enough to demonstrate proper bedding choices.... The only statistic I think we need is: In the 0-6 month age, find out how many "baby nights" there are for non-prone & alone sleeping and how many "baby-nights" there are for co-sleeping with an adult per 100,000 births. I bet there will be many more deaths per baby-night in the co-sleeping group. Maybe you could come up with a certification program for parents who want to co-sleep to make sure they do it safely! I don't think there is a safe way to co-sleep babies less than 6 months old. At least not for the humans in my area. Assuming you are directly involved in the infant care of more than 200 babies / year for more than 5 years, you must have some SIDS experience. Do you know the parameters for those deaths? Since you don't want to say "Bedsharing causes babies to die" can you at least say "Co-sleeping seems to be strongly associated with infantdeaths"? -gb ---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Reply-To: Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 10:14:56 EDT >Of all the cases of SIDS in the last few years, does anyone know exactly how >many babies died in an adult bed, bed-sharing with the parents (vs other >children, another adult, on the sofa), vs in an approved crib by themselves? > >I think a case could be made for looking at ALL the statistics: > >Perhaps call it "unexplained infant deaths" and then divide them thusly, and >see where the real statistics lie: > >1. Alone, in a crib >2. Bedsharing with risk factors in place such as: > Drugs, alcohol, prone sleeping, obesity, cigarette smoking, other >children in the bed as well as the parents, other adults. > (I personally don't think that anyone is going to be as sensitive to >the baby in bed as the mother -- not even the father). >3. Bedsharing with the mother (or parents) with all safety factors in place: > no alcohol or drugs, no other children, in a supine position, not a >waterbed, a firm mattress, parents not obese [and a definition has to be made >for obese as well] >4. And finally, sleeping with the baby on the couch or in a lazy-boy chair, >or in a waterbed. > >Until we have these delineated, I don't think that we can simply say that >"Bedsharing causes babies to die." > >There is such a thing as "safe sleeping" whether it is in a crib or in the >parent's bed, or on the floor on a mattress. > >Jan