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Exclusive: A major new report seen by the IoS has revealed that smoking holds the key to a mystery that has baffled doctors and brought heartache to thousands. By Roger Dobson and Senay Boztas
Nine out of 10 mothers whose babies suffered cot death smoked during pregnancy, according to a scientific study to be published this week. The study, thought to be one of the most authoritative to date on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), says women who smoke during pregnancy are four times more likely than non-smokers to see their child fall victim to cot death.
The comprehensive report will make a strong case for the Government to increase the scope of anti-smoking legislation. It even suggests a possible move to try to ban pregnant women from getting tobacco altogether.
The study, produced by Bristol University’s Institute of Child Life and Health, is based on analysis of the evidence of 21 international studies on smoking and cot death. The report, co-authored by Peter Fleming, professor of infant health and developmental physiology, and Dr Peter Blair, senior research fellow, will be published this week in the medical journal Early Human Development.
The report urges the Government “to emphasise the adverse effects of tobacco smoke exposure to infants and among pregnant women”. It also warns that this year’s ban on smoking in public places must not result in an increased exposure of infants or pregnant woman at home – smoking in their presence should be seen as being “anti-social, potentially dangerous, and unacceptable”.
The study points out that many mothers and mothers-to-be have not heeded warnings about smoking and may need to have their access to tobacco restricted. “Given the power that tobacco addiction holds over its victims, there is grave concern as to whether it will be a successfully modifiable risk factor without fundamental changes in tobacco availability to vulnerable individuals,” it states.
Scientists are working to the theory that exposure to smoke during the pregnancy or just after birth has an effect on brain chemicals in the foetus or in infants, increasing the risk of SIDS.
The Government is considering whether it should change its advice on smoking. It recommends that pregnant women should not drink alcohol at all, but simply recommends that mothers and fathers “cut smoking in pregnancy”.
These findings will add weight to calls from doctors earlier this year for a ban on parents smoking indoors where children are present. Professor Robert West, of University College London, the Government’s most senior smoking adviser, said: “We can apply powerful social pressure on parents not to smoke in the house.”
Speaking about the new report, Dr Blair said: “If smoking is a cause of SIDS, and the evidence suggests it is, we think that if all parents stopped smoking tomorrow more than 60 per cent of SIDS deaths would be prevented.”
Archive for October 14th, 2007
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Viewpoint from the broadcaster and campaigner who lost her baby to cot death
We’ve known for some time that the link between cot death and smoking was even stronger than the link between lung cancer and smoking, yet many in the medical world chose to ignore it, because it couldn’t be scientifically proved.
In 1991, we were losing 2,500 babies to cot death in the UK. The terrible morning of 12 July was when it happened to my family. It was my eldest son’s birthday, and after I’d woken him with a birthday song, I went on to my baby’s nursery. What I saw I describe as every mother’s nightmare. There in the cot, a little, stiff, cold statue of a child where my cuddly, warm, milky baby had fallen asleep.
I was treated with sympathy, but also astounding complacency. I was told that I should “cheer up and have another one”. In New Zealand, however, they couldn’t afford such complacency. They had the highest cot death rate in the world – and couldn’t tell why. So they launched a three-year epidemiological study. Every time a baby died, they researched everything from age, environment, dummies, parental smoking, breast milk or formula – everything. They also took data from at least two “controls” ( babies who had not died that night) to draw comparisons.
After 18 months, the results were so dramatic that they felt compelled to turn the study into a campaign. Because the babies who were dying were the ones on their tummies and those whose parents smoked. New Zealand’s most famous female broadcaster went on TV every night asking parents to turn their babies on to their backs, and to stop smoking near them. The cot death rate plummeted almost overnight.
Back home, our Back to Sleep campaign proved that the advice worked. In 1991, I presented a TV advert with the four life-saving tips: sleep your baby on his back; don’t smoke anywhere near him; don’t overheat him and go to the doctor if he has coughs, colds and sniffles. Our cot death rate fell dramatically, from 2,500 down to around 300 a year.
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Pauline Goodwin’s daughter was taken into care before she’d even left hospital. She says she’ll fight to get her baby back
When Pauline Goodwin went into hospital to give birth to a baby daughter in June 2005, two people came to see her in the delivery room: they were social workers asking her to sign the papers that would entitle them to put the baby into care. Goodwin refused.
When the baby was just three days old, Goodwin was summoned to court and instructed to leave her baby in the care of the hospital. The judge issued a care order and by the time Goodwin left the courtroom, the social services had already dropped by the hospital to collect her baby.
“They said that because the baby had never lived in a family unit, she didn’t have a bond with us so it didn’t matter if she was taken away,” says Goodwin. “I don’t know where she is now and I’m not entitled to know.”
In a case that could make legal history, Goodwin plans to go to the European Court of Human Rights to prove the adoption of her daughter was fraudulent.
The irony of Goodwin’s situation is that, initially, she welcomed the intervention of the social services. For 10 years she had been in an abusive marriage in which she had had five children. When the marriage collapsed, Goodwin had a breakdown. At the time, her youngest child was three months old and social services came forward offering to help.
But within a few weeks, the social workers’ attitude had changed. “They started visiting two or three times a day and phoning the children’s schools daily.” Social workers turned up during the middle of one of the children’s birthday parties and sometimes would arrive to carry out spot-checks at 10pm, shining torches into the sleeping children’s faces to check it was them.
Then the threats started. One social workers said it was her aim to get the children into care. “They also said that they’d had two or three people phoning in daily to say they’d seen my kids out playing till all hours or that I had left them and gone out drinking. The stupid thing is that often I had a social worker round at the moment this was meant to be happening.”
The social services claimed to have issues in three areas. First, with the state of Goodwin’s house. “It was messy,” she admits, “but it was just toys and clothes; it was never dirty.” So Goodwin stripped the house, redecorated and bought new bunk beds for the children. “When I did that, all they said was ‘Where did you get the money from?’” She was also criticised for her children’s poor school attendance. “I did find it difficult to get them all up and out in the morning. I was sending them to school in a taxi and that worked fine, but the social services decided I wasn’t allowed to.” And third, they highlighted missed medical appointments. “I missed two dental appointments,” says Goodwin, “and I refused to give my two youngest the MMR because I wanted more information.”
Wales social work crisis
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COUNCILS are offering £3,000 “golden hellos” and student loan pay-offs in an effort to combat a widespread shortage of social workers in Wales.
Wales on Sunday can reveal that these are just two of the emergency measures being implemented to solve the growing crisis.
Other councils are even flying as far away as the United States and New Zealand to recruit experienced staff to fill key vacancies.
Councillor John Dixon, Cardiff Council’s executive member for social care, warned that if councils did not take action, he feared the deficit would remain indefinitely.
“There’s a Wales-wide shortage of child social carers – any professional in the business will reaffirm that,” said Mr Dixon. The problem has existed for a very long time now.
“Councils have no other choice but to take increasingly innovative steps in order to tackle this problem because it doesn’t look like it is going to go away any time soon.”
Mr Dixon said his own council was regularly visiting Germany as part of its recruitment campaign.
“We’ve found that there seems to be a surplus of social workers there,” he said. “Luckily for us, their social work system operates in a similar way to ours, meaning that anybody that we recruit from there does not have to go through such a lengthy induction period.”
Although there is no centralised record of the shortage, the three biggest councils – Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham – all have a significant number of vacancies.
Swansea Council says it currently has 19 vacant posts and was urgently trying to fill them.
Mum and dad hit me
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When Rachel arrived at her after-school club with a black eye, the play leader gently took her to one side and asked what had happened.
Using sign language, the deaf nine-year-old described how her father had punched her. She then told how her mum had thrown a telephone at her head after losing her temper one afternoon.
One of Rachel’s brothers, a two-year-old, also went to the club and was often covered in bruises and dressed in filthy clothes.
The play leader’s daughter – an occasional baby-sitter for Rachel’s family – had described seeing dog mess around the flat, piles of rubbish and old mattresses thrown on the floor for the kids to sleep on.
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Concern at private equity’s role in social services
The collapse of a private equity-backed care home dealing with sexually abused and autistic children has sparked renewed concern at the advance of financial buyers into British public services.
Sedgmoor, owned by established private equity firm ECI Partners, ran 45 homes for vulnerable children. It went into administration two weeks ago.
After selling most of the care homes, administrator KPMG spent several days urgently liaising with local authorities to find places for dozens of children. Charities claimed some had nowhere to go after the school day ended.
Jack Dromey, Unite deputy general secretary, said: ‘It beggars belief that the care of the vulnerable might now be put at risk by the cost-cutting which is a characteristic of private equity. Inevitably long-term care considerations will give way to short-term profit-making.’
But sources close to ECI blame its demise on a shift in government policy which saw children moved out of care homes into foster homes. The policy change has prompted a stampede of private equity firms into the foster-care sector. The venture capital firm 3i and a number of other financial buyers still run dozens more children’s care homes.
Experts say private equity firms now control 30 per cent of the independent foster agency market. Last December, Sovereign Capital bought the country’s second largest foster agency, NFA, and at least six big agencies have fallen to private equity players. Sources say foster businesses are keen to turn to private equity as a ready source of capital to fund rapid expansion.
The trend has sparked deep unease among children’s charities, who say private equity-backed foster agencies are piling extra work on social workers and will raise charges to local authorities.
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ELIZABETH HISLOP was eight years old and lying in bed, pretending to be asleep, when she heard her father come into her bedroom. She can’t remember exactly when it started, but she also can’t recall a time when she wasn’t being abused.
She had hoped that if he found her curled up asleep, he’d leave her alone, but he never did. This time was no different, except that for the first time he raped her.
“Now clean yourself up and don’t make me do that again,” he said, shifting all the responsibility on to his traumatised child.
Elizabeth’s story of what happened to her behind the modest front door of her 1970s Renfrewshire home is one of those that makes you want to weep and rage at once, and yet it also makes you marvel at the survival skills of a little girl failed by social services, who overcame so much to become a loving mother and grandmother. Still fighting for changes in unjust compensation laws, plus a simple admission of failure by those who were supposed to be protecting her, Elizabeth’s story stands out from hundreds of other tragic cases because of her decision to pardon the man who ruined her childhood. It enabled her to move on to live a life that is a testament to the redemptive powers of forgiveness.
Both her parents were alcoholics and, from a young age, while taking care of her two younger brothers, she endured her father’s sexual abuse. Once her two older sisters and big brother had left home, she had to care for the younger ones as well as her parents.
It would be hard to find more depressing reading material than her social-work files – at least those she has been able to obtain from Renfrewshire Council. Despite the fact that her father was eventually jailed for sexual abuse in 1977 – when she was 12 – social workers allowed him to return to the family home without first removing Elizabeth and her younger brothers from his care.
William had always ruled his family through fear, beating his wife and six children. Left as the eldest child at home, Elizabeth tried to protect her brothers. “I can remember times when I had to get in the way when he was beating them, as I thought he might kill them,” she says. “‘Please, Dad, let him be,’ I begged once as blood poured down my brother’s face. ‘You can have his, then,’ he yelled, turning the blows on me.
“I took more than my share of the violence, as well as coping with the sexual abuse. I felt I had no choice. I had to protect my family.”
William was a mass of contradictions. He ran the house like a military camp. “We were like little soldiers to him and discipline was rigid,” Elizabeth recalls. “If we stepped out of line, we were beaten. But to the outside world, he would have seemed the perfect father. He was good company, funny and could be very generous, but not to us. He was so kind to other people that it was hard not to love him. But it broke our hearts that his vicious side was just for us.
“My mum was terrified of him as well. I’ve often wondered how she could have failed to notice the sexual abuse, but I do believe she never suspected. No one spoke about child sexual abuse in the 1960s and 1970s. So while she took refuge in the bottle, my father took away my innocence.”
As Elizabeth grew older, she realised that not all fathers behaved that way to their daughters. “I felt hatred and revulsion. But part of me still loved him and wanted his approval. This caused terrible feelings of guilt and shame. How could I love him after what he’d done to me? The confusion made it harder to tell anyone what was happening.”
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Adoption is the proof of existence of humanitarian values. Though it is an age-old process, it is more recognized in recent times. Earlier people were taboo stricken and superstitions regarding adoption. But with widespread education most people have cast these unnecessary superstitions away and the proof is the increased percentage of adoption worldwide. Many celebrities around the world have also involved themselves in this humane act.
When children are adopted their birth details are disclosed only to the adopters and the information is labeled as non-identifying. It is kept secret with the government agency that is handling the adoption or the court. Now if the adoptee, after growing up, feels the urge to reunite with his birth parents he has to go through a series of legal matters for ending his journey on a happy note.
At first the adoptee has to gather up all necessary details about him, which may include his birth name, birth date, place of birth, the name of the hospital, his vital statistics, the name of the doctor and the time of his birth. Then he has to register himself with any state agency or a private one, which would help him find birth parents. After adoptee registry one has to find all the necessary information about the birth parents and give them to the concerned agency. It would be difficult to carve out these information but one can always seek help from family and relatives.
Once the adoptee is fully equipped with all the required information his actual search for birth parents starts. In adoption registry the adopted child’s search is registered along with all information. Adoption registry is a process, which targets to reunite the adoptee with his birth parents. The numbers of successful case are countless.
Was mother let down by system?
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The former partner of a woman who died in a road crash just days after she was sent home from care today claimed she not given adequate help by the authorities. Antoinette Davis, 52, was hit by a white Ford Ranger travelling towards Norwich on the B1332 at Brooke in the early hours of Friday morning. The accident happened after Ms Davis had been missing from her home in Bergh Apton for five days and a major police appeal was launched. Gary Nelson, who lived with Ms Davis for 14 years, before moving out of their shared home in Church Road earlier this year, said she had been suffering from mental illness and depression for some time. He said in April, she had been taken out of her home by social services and placed in sheltered accommodation at Barnham House in Chedgrave near Loddon. She was then moved back to Church Road the Thursday before going missing, a move Mr Nelson condemned because he said there was no way she should have been let to go home. He said: “I feel totally let down by the authorities, they should not have allowed her to come back home with the state she was in, they should have cared for her. The person I feel sorry for in all of this is the car driver, my sympathies go out to him.” He is now planning to express his concerns to South Norfolk MP Richard Bacon and hopes speaking out will stop the same thing happening again.
Workers urged to play their part
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PUBLIC sector workers across Suffolk are being urged to “play their part” to reduce anti-social behaviour and the fear of crime. This week saw the launch of a new video and hotline aimed at the county’s 50,000 public sector workers, from housing officers to library assistants. It is hoped that the video, produced by Suffolk Films, will be shown staff over the next 12 months, and will encourage them to work together to make a positive impact in the county. Alan Keely, of Suffolk County Council’s community safety unit, said: “We wanted to find a way to encourage all our staff to play their part. “Although Suffolk is a very safe place – one of the safest places in the country – that isn’t always the perception that people have. “Because of the way that communities are changing, people are less likely to know their neighbours, for example, anti-social behaviour such as speeding and graffiti can give the impression that things are worse than they are.” It is hoped that by combining their resources, the different agencies such as fire safety and social work can solve problems in less time than it would traditionally take. Mr Keely said: “For example, we have fire safety officers but they can’t go to everyone’s house and check their smoke alarms are working. “Care workers visit people in their homes. All it would need would be for them to press the test button when they are visiting someone and if there is a problem, it can be reported.”
