State Issues Alert On Infant Sleep-Related Risks

An 8-week-old baby boy slips out of his sleeping grandmother’s arms and suffocates in the folds of a couch. A 7-week-old girl is found dead lying on her stomach in her mother’s bed, where she had been placed to sleep, as a nearby crib sat unused. These are two of 23 infants who died in Connecticut last year of “sudden infant death syndrome” or undetermined causes. Of those cases, 18 were found to have risk factors associated with the sleep environment, including co-sleeping in an adult bed with parents, sleeping with a heavy blanket or pillows, or being placed on their stomachs. In a public health alert issued Monday, the Office of the Child Advocate and the Connecticut Child Fatality Review Panel warned that the number of Connecticut infants who died between 2001 and 2013 in cases involving unsafe sleep conditions was almost three times higher than the number of infants who died from child abuse.