20 min & $20 saves babies lives

In New Zealand, they did a campaign (beginning in 1998) to encourage parents to wrap their baby mattresses. If you look at this link, there’s about 8 facts that show the history of their campaign: (http://www.babymattresscovers.com/crib_death_summary.html)

Over 190,000 babies sleep on wrapped mattresses in New Zealand.  There have been 0 deaths in of babies sleeping on a wrapped mattresses.  In other words, for over 10 years, wrapping mattresses has been 100% effective in saving babies from SIDS. 

If you research SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) you’ll find that some experts say that breastfeeding and sleeping with your baby helps prevent it, other experts say it increases the likelihood.  In 1994, the American Academy of Pediatric launched a campaign to encourage parents to have babies sleep on their backs.  The response to that was a dramatic drop in SIDS deaths.  But they didn’t go away.  If you look at a graph showing the drop of SIDS, you’ll see that while it dropped in response to back sleeping, it has leveled off.  Deaths from SIDS have not decreased since 2001 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Back_to_sleep_plot.png). 

There are still approximately 3000 babies that die in the US every year due to SIDS.  It is the leading cause of death for babies under one year and typically occurs between 2 and 4 months of age.  So babies sleeping on their back helps, but there must be some other reason. I believe that it is the foam and fire retardant chemicals that slowly offgas and break down coming from the mattress.  Older babies usually are fine because their lungs are more developed.

There is something we do which is not mainstream but totally easy, cheap and potentially life-saving.  It can be done in 20 minutes and never have to be done again and will provide protection for your sweet babies for the entire time they sleep on their baby mattresses.

My posts about it including how to wrap a mattress:

• Baby mattresses (my post)
• DIY Mattress Wrapping (my post)
• Prevent SIDS
• Divergent View (another passionate mom convinced we can pretty much eliminate SIDS.
• Cot (Brit way of saying mattress) life 2000 (the deepest research available)