I'm getting more and more interested in the SIDS/suffocation confusion, which almost all the researchers seem to share in.  A quote from Krouse et al, Bed-sharing influences, attitudes, and practices: Implications for promoting safe infant sleep. J Child Health Care 2012:

"Bed-sharing has been suggested in the literature to increase the infant risk for SIDS due to the risks of overlaying or entrapment, wedging, falling or strangulation (Mesich, 2005)."

Not one of those risk factors is SIDS.  They're all suffocation.

The same confusion - I *think* - has happened with the obesity issue.  I know of only one study on obesity and infant death, Chen A, Feresu SA, Fernandez C, Rogan WJ.  Maternal obesity and the risk of infant death in the United States.  Epidemiology 2009; 20(1): 74-81. 

My reading of it is that SIDS is the issue with obesity, not suffocation.  So the obese woman has set her child up for it prenatally and would do well to breastfeed, to help compensate for a risk factor that she can no longer do anything about.  And separate sleep tends to shorten breastfeeding duration, so she's actually better off bedsharing than not!

It's really important for all of us to keep the two issues separate.  I get tripped up over and over again, and obviously the researchers do too.  But mixing them leads to misinterpretations like the obesity one (if I'm right about it, and I'm not positive that I am).  

And now policy-makers want to drop the distinction altogether and talk about SUID/SUDI.  They still haven't agreed on the term, but it's sudden unexpected infant death, and it includes everything from infanticide to metabolic disorders to poisoning, along with suffocation and SIDS.  It makes the studies a whole lot easier and the results a whole lot less valuable.  What a mess!  It's like combining car crashes and poisoning as the same cause of death.  Prevent poisoning by wearing your seatbelt!!

Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC, LLLL Ithaca, NY  USA

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