I asked James McKenna if he could comment about "Megan" who died last Friday
while sleeping in the same bed as her mother.  He writes:

>The interpretation that the presence of the mother in bed with her preterm
>was anything >but potentially helpful to her infant, is nothing more than a
cruel and culturally biased statement, unless the infant was sleeping in an
unsafe cosleeping environment which includes bedsharing with a mother who
smokes, or on extraordinarily soft bedding with the mother desensitized by drugs
>or medication.  Especially for a premature baby scientific
>studies have established that skin-to-skin contact is physiologically
>beneficial and studies of full term infants cosleeping (bedsharing) have
>likewise yielded physiological data that is potentially protective of
>SIDS-though no case control studies have demonstrataed this. However, at
>times like this it is important to point out that the lowest rates of
>infants dying from SIDS are found in countries for which
>bedsharing/colseeping is the norm, such as Japan and Hong Kong.
>
>Of course, mothers who smoke have a slightly increased risk of their
>infant dying from SIDS if their baby cosleeps--but even this finding does
>not jusify the conclusion that the baby died from SIDS because it was
>bedsharing--anymore than one can conclude that a baby that dies from SIDS
>while sleeping on its stomach died only because of the prone infant sleep
>position. Baby's still die from SIDS who do not cosleep and who are lying
>in the safer supine sleep. In these instances  we do not conclude that
>solitariness caused the death. Again, bedsharing did not cause this baby
>to die. Unfortunately, even under the best of circumstances, such as when
>babies cosleeping to breast feed,  babies can still do die from SIDS.
>There
>is no child care practice that guarantees protection--only practices such
>as breastfeeding, as this mother was doing, that can potentially offer
>protection from SIDS.
>
>The papers I refer to in this note are available in scientific journals
>all
>refereed. This mother should be made to feel that she did everything
>possible to promote her infant's health and that perhaps some small
>consolation is that this baby died close to her mother's loving body.
>Unless extraordinary physical evidence exists to the contrary, it is
>completely unjustified to conclude that the baby was, in fact, overlayed.
>James J. McKenna Ph.D. Professor of Anthropology, Pomona College  and
>Senior Researcher
>(SIDS Project) University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine
>Department of Neurology
>
>
Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nutrition
Texas A&M University