Suffocating while sleeping remains a leading cause of death for Cook County babies, and Black babies are suffering the most, a new report found.
County medical examiners and pediatricians at Rush University Medical Center examined 208 cases where infants died suddenly and unexpectedly in their sleep from 2019 to 2023. Of those babies, 153 were Black, 34 were Hispanic and 19 were white.
When the baby’s cause of death was identified, suffocating was the most common reason, according to the report published Wednesday, the first day of Safe Sleep Awareness Month.
Sudden, unexpected infant deaths happen to infants under the age of 1 and include accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed and unknown causes. Sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, is another common term that means the cause of a sudden and unexpected infant death is unknown.
In the 1990s, several public health efforts sought to prevent sleep-related deaths. The American Academy of Pediatrics published its safe sleep recommendations in 1992 and the nationwide Back to Sleep campaign in 1994 educated parents on how to safely put their babies to bed.
Dr. Kyran Quinlan, a pediatrician at Rush University Children’s Hospital, told the Sun-Times that messaging helped to considerably reduce sudden and unexpected infant deaths.
But after 2000, those deaths plateaued and recently started to increase, especially cases where babies suffocate and die in their sleep, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis.
“Over the past two decades, there has been little progress in preventing these deaths,” the county’s report reads.
In 2019, Cook County created the Sudden Unexpected Infant Death Case Registry to better understand those deaths and how to prevent them, Dr. Ponni Arunkumar, Cook County’s chief medical examiner, said during a news conference Wednesday unveiling the report.
“We wanted to learn all we could about the circumstances of these mysterious deaths. These seemingly healthy infants went to sleep one night and never woke up,” Arunkumar said.
The new study found that 99% of the babies who died suddenly and unexpectedly in their sleep were in unsafe sleeping situations.
Nearly half were found on their stomach or on their side. Over half of the babies were sleeping with another person, like a parent or an older sibling. The vast majority of the infants — 84% — were found asleep not in a crib but in an adult’s bed or on a couch. Nearly every baby was found surrounded by soft bedding.
These deaths also overwhelmingly impact Black and Hispanic families on the city’s South and West sides. The sleep-related death rate for Black babies was 14 times higher than the rate for white babies. Hispanic babies were twice as likely to die suddenly in their sleep.
Part of the problem is parents not knowing the risks of unsafe sleeping conditions, officials and physicians told reporters Wednesday.
“Babies are dying simply because mothers don’t have the information,” said Dr. Olusibmo Ige, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Ige encouraged parents to learn and follow the ABCs of safe sleep: the baby should sleep alone, on their back and in a crib free of soft bedding like pillows and stuffed animals.
Quinlan said parents often don’t perceive unsafe sleep habits as a major threat to their babies.
“When a child dies in a car crash, people hear about it. When a house fire kills kids, you hear about that. Parents protect their children from those things, they use car seats, have smoke detectors,” Quinlan said. “But these deaths happen and people don’t know about them, they don’t get into the paper.”
Destiny Tyler of Plainfield lost her infant son Kaiden 11 years ago after he suffocated in his sleep. Since his death, Tyler has been outspoken about keeping babies safe in their sleep.
“I was just a young mom trying to figure it out,” she said Wednesday. “I think like so many other mothers we feel like our child is safest with us, because we don’t know. Lack of education has caused a lot of losses.”
