A new report by a state oversight panel shows a growing number infant deaths in Kentucky are caused by unsafe sleep situations, often suffocated while sleeping with an adult impaired by drugs or alcohol.
Other small children have died after ingesting drugs left in the home by adults, according to the 2015 annual report by the Child Fatality and Near Fatality External Review Panel.
The role of the panel, created in 2012 by former Governor Steve Beshear amid several high-profile child abuse deaths, is to review deaths and life-threatening injuries to children from suspected abuse or neglect with a goal of preventing such incidents and recommending policy changes to reduce child deaths and injuries.
This year’s report examined 77 cases of deaths or serious injuries.
Panel chairman Roger Crittenden, a retired Franklin Circuit Court judge, said with funding from the General Assembly in 2014, the panel has been able to hire staff and provide a more detailed analysis of individual child death and injury cases that sometimes run to hundreds of pages.
The panel believes some child sleep deaths involving impaired adults go uncounted because caregivers are not routinely tested for drugs or alcohol when a child dies unexpectedly in their care.
Among the panel’s recommendations is that the state develop a system for uniformly testing adults for drugs or alcohol in such circumstances.
State public health officials recently launched a “safe sleep” campaign aimed at reducing unexpected deaths of children younger than age 1, urging parents to follow the “ABCs of safe sleep for infants” putting babies to bed alone, on the back, in a crib. About 85 Kentucky infants suffer unexpected deaths each year.
Public health efforts should include warnings that an infant is at even greater risk sleeping with an adult impaired by alcohol, illegal drugs or prescription drugs such as painkillers.
Source: AP
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