Citation

Byard RW. Forensic Sci. Med. Pathol. 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Adelaide Medical School, The University of Adelaide, Frome Road, Level 3 Medical School North Building, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia. roger.byard@sa.gov.au.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s12024-020-00229-0

PMID

32125631

Abstract

Death while being breastfed forms a specific subset of shared sleeping fatalities [1]. One of the concerns which initiated this original study was that two infants had died during breastfeeding in the post-neonatal ward of a local hospital. As the first death had been incorrectly called sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) no steps were taken to increase the monitoring of exhausted mothers while in hospital care. The second death was, however, correctly attributed to suffocation as the infant had been found dead underneath and facing into the sleeping mother’s large breast. Following this autopsy conclusion, ward protocols were changed and no further deaths have occurred in the ensuing decades. This provides an excellent illustration of the usefulness that medicolegal investigations by pathologists may have in preventing deaths.

There has been a very strong tendency for researchers to lump all infant deaths under the rubric of SIDS. This was exemplified by recent papers where all infant deaths in shared sleeping environments were called SIDS, including cases where the deaths occurred on the narrow, sloped and soft surfaces of a sofa/couch that was being shared with an adult [2,3,4]. The lack of acknowledgment that at least some of these cases must be due to suffocation is of concern. Certainly the differentiation of suffocation from SIDS has been difficult with the previous markers for asphyxia such as liquid blood and petechiae being now recognised as being quite unreliable ...

Language: en