FORTY-SIX unexplained infant deaths and two conflicting verdicts on what caused them. That’s the latest twist in the controversy over whether a second cot death in a family is likely to be a simple tragedy or something more sinister.
Two years ago a research paper by Robert Carpenter at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and his colleagues shifted the blame away from parents, concluding that 40 of the 46 deaths were “natural” ( These conclusions are now being challenged by two retired British paediatricians. Chris Bacon and Edmund Hey used the…
