The number of deaths attributed to SIDS in the United States each year has fallen from 10,000 in the early 1970s to about 6,000 today. And despite the drop, the face of SIDS hasn't changed much over the years. It still strikes poor black families about twice as often as wealthy white families. It can, but the truth is that it doesn't happen to everybody. Dr. Abraham Bergman, the physician-activist credited with securing passage of the 1974 SIDS Act, sees a parallel between the drop in SIDS and the overall decline in infant mortality, which remains disproportionately high among blacks.
Some people feel that infant sleeping position has had a big impact.
In other countries, public campaigns urging parents to put their babies to sleep on their backs rather than their stomachs has cut the number of SIDS deaths in half. Some researchers believe that when babies sleep on their stomachs, with their noses embedded in soft surfaces, they rebreathe the air they exhale. The trapped air contains lethal levels of carbon dioxide. But Bergman and others who have watched medicine's approach to SIDS evolve over the last three decades remain cautious. The thing I always use to teach humility to us is that in the 1930s in the United States the avant garde practice of pediatrics was to take an X-ray of a baby, and if they had a large thymus gland, to irradiate them to prevent crib death.