"Two thirds of US infants younger than 12 months are in nonparental child care. Infants of employed mothers spend an average of 22 hours each week in child care, and 32% of infants are in child care fulltime (defined as 35 hours or more each week). Of the infants who are cared for by secondary (nonparental) caregivers, approximately 50% are cared for by relatives, 10% are cared for by an in-home babysitter, and the remainder are in organized child care (ie, a child care center or family child care home).  In the United States, approximately 20% of SIDS deaths occur while the infant is in the care of a nonparental caregiver. Despite the remarkable decrease in the rate of SIDS and decreased frequency of prone sleeping nationally, the proportion of SIDS deaths occurring in child care remained constant between 1996 and 1998. "

"To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate - defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births - fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005.

Whether the rises continue or not, federal officials say, rates have stagnated in the Deep South at levels well above the national average.

Most striking, here and throughout the country, is the large racial disparity. In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004, while those among whites rose to 6.6 per thousand from 6.1. (The national average in 2003 was 5.7 for whites and 14.0 for blacks.)

The overall jump in Mississippi meant that 65 more babies died in 2005 than in the previous year, for a total of 481."

Households of any type can experience the heartbreak of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).  However, a growing body of research suggests that this tragedy is far less likely to strike the intact two-parent family than it is to hit the single-mother household.  The latest evidence appears in a study recently published in Pediatrics by researchers from Cambridge University and the British Medical Research Council. 

Analyzing data drawn from the Scottish Morbidity Record for the years 1992 to 2001, the British scholars establish a clear linkage between maternal marital status and risk of SIDS.  Indeed, the researchers calculate that for the years in question less than one-third (30.2%) of the Scottish SIDS deaths involved infants with married mothers!  Even in multi-variable statistical analysis that accounts for the child's birth weight and the mother's age and tobacco use, the researchers calculate that babies with married mothers are only about half as likely to die of SIDS (Adjusted Odds Ratio of 0.54; p = 0.001). 

The authors of the new study discuss hopes for reducing the risk of SIDS by deploying health professionals armed with symptom diaries and apnea monitors to make weekly visits to new mothers.  How strange that they say nothing about the need to guide prospective mothers toward the wedding chapel!