In fact, the American medical establishment was years behind other countries in making non-prone infant sleep position recommendations and American doctors were very reluctant to embrace the new recommendations when they did come out in 1992. It should be remembered that many families have done all 6 things recommended and their baby still died. For the 10's of thousands of parents and grandparents of SIDS victims, the implication that they 'failed' or did something wrong inflicts unnecessary pain and guilt and is simply unjustified. Again, I would like to emphasize that the article by Stephanie Wood contains a great deal of accurate and extremely important information and you deserve credit for publishing an article on such an important subject. However, I would also urge you to correct the misleading impressions that SIDS is 'extremely rare' and that parents of SIDS victims are somehow to blame for the deaths of their children.
Prevention is a difficult term to use because it means so many different things to different people.
SIDS families don't need any more guilt. I hope you will publish something to balance or offset these misleading impressions. Thank you for your attention. Maybe the rate of SIDS is low, but if adults were dropping dead of unknown causes at the rate of about one every hour in the US, more would be done. When an article is written for the general public, we feel that both points of view should be addressed.