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Date: | Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:29:11 +0100 |
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I enjoyed Rob's bread thing, too - but it's a satire on the use of
statistics which take 2 or more co-incidental phenomena and extrapolate
cause and effect.
It is not a satire on the ' babies dead in adult beds' stats.
The babies who died in adult beds died as a direct result of being *there*,
and not somewhere else, according to the Commission's figures.
The figures are not a record of 'all the babies who died when in an adult
bed', which would include SIDS, babies who died of an unrelated medical or
develoopmental condition, babies who were murdered, or who choked, or who
otherwise suffered some sort of fatal occurence unrelated to the furniture
or the fact that an adult accidentally (one assumes) smothered/suffocated
them. If the figures *were* of all the babies who were in an adult bed
when they died, then the bread thing would work. It would just be
co-incidence, extrapolated into cause and effect.
I am sounding like a broken record here, sorry, but we have to be very
careful when arguing against the way the Commission's figures have been
used to ban co-sleeping.
It is hard for us to be careful, as few of us are mathematicians, and it's
hard for me who has always struggled with Maths - but we have to make the
effort : (
The only mathematically/statistically worthwhile response is to say 'yes,
these babies died and they would not have died if they had been sleeping
elsewhere - so let's make co-sleeping as safe as we can, so we don't
prevent babies and adults from all the health and emotional gains we know
come with co-sleeping.'
Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc Newcastle upon Tyne UK
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