Of all the fears associated with early parenthood, none is greater than the possibility of an infant's unexplainable and sudden death. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) poses such a threat to seemingly healthy babies of all socio-economic and racial backgrounds under one year old. Officially defined and named at a 1969 international conference on causes of sudden death in infants, SIDS has been a political and medical controversy ever since. Although researchers had linked a lower risk of SIDS to babies sleeping on their backs and a higher risk of SIDS to babies exposed to second-hand smoke, by the late 1990s researchers were still uncertain of SIDS' cause(s). SIDS was the leading cause of post-natal mortality from 1980-1994. Heightening the fears surrounding SIDS, controversy rose in late 1997 as an article in Pediatrics stated that some SIDS attributed deaths are caused by child abuse and, in 1998, when a large German study associated SIDS with CMV virus, which is common in AIDS patients. As the millennium came to a close, many unanswered questions and innumerable theories surrounded SIDS, which continued to cause grief.

Further Reading:

Bergman, A. B., J. B. Beckwith, and C. G. Ray, editors. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Causes of Sudden Death in Infants. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1970.

Guntheroth, Warren G. Crib Death: The Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, 3rd ed. Armonk, New York, Futura Publishing, 1995.

Journal of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and Infant Mortality. New York, Plenum Press, 1996.