Nassau research team: 10 babies died of SIDS in 2009

Ten babies died as a result of sudden infant death syndrome in Nassau County last year, health officials said Tuesday as they released a report on childhood fatalities and new guidelines to protect newborns from unnecessary deaths.

The mortality research was conducted by the Nassau County Child Fatality Review Team, which was created in January of last year to investigate the deaths of county residents from birth to 17 years of age whose loss of life was otherwise unexpected or unexplained.

All told, 29 children in that category died in Nassau last year, according to the report.

While additional investigation pinpointed the causes of 19 deaths, 10 were determined to be SIDS or other sleep-related conditions. The babies, according to the fatality-review team's findings, were between the ages of 9 days and 5 months.

SIDS is defined as the unexpected death during sleep of an apparently healthy infant between the ages of 1 month and 1 year. Once commonly called crib death, the condition is the third leading cause of infant mortality in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cigarette smoking by anyone in an infant's household can more than double the risk of SIDS, according to the CDC. But other problems, such as side or belly sleep-positioning, bed sharing, soft toys or bedding can increase the risk of crib death.

"This is a huge educational message, and we need to get this out to the public," Nassau County health department spokeswoman Mary Ellen Laurain said Tuesday.

Although SIDS has declined in recent years, the decrease has been offset by a rise in mortality for accidental sleep-related suffocation and strangulation, according to CDC data in the Nassau report.

The county's childhood deaths were studied by a multidisciplinary team. Childhood mortality data for 2009 were not available Tuesday for Suffolk County, which does not have a counterpart to the fatality-review team, health department spokeswoman Grace Kelly-McGovern said.

Safe-sleep guidelines, which comport with measures outlined by the American Academy of Pediatrics, were released along with the report and will be mailed to all pediatricians, family practitioners and obstetricians in Nassau, said the county's health commissioner, Dr. Maria Torroella Carney.