Building Baby Safety From the Ground Up
Source: Consumer Product Safety Commission

A warm bath, lullaby and bedtime stories are staples in your child’s nighttime routine. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) urges parents and caregivers to add a safe sleep environment to the daily routine of placing baby to sleep.

CPSC staff is aware of 97 crib related deaths from 2002 through 2004.

A CPSC staff analysis (pdf) of reports of deaths related to cribs found that about half of the deaths were in cribs containing pillows, quilts and other bedding. About half of these were due to suffocation when infants ended up face down on pillows or face down in a crib with pillows, quilts and other bedding.

Thirty-percent of crib deaths were attributed to entrapment between components of old cribs that were in bad condition, with broken or missing parts or loose hardware, and entrapment in spaces generated between the sides of a crib and an ill fitted mattress. The remainder of the deaths were associated with accessories situated in/around the crib (such as window cords or curtain tie backs), falls out of cribs, alterations made to cribs, or entrapment when the child became wedged between the crib and other furniture or a wall.

+ Nursery Product-Related Injuries and Deaths among Children under Age Five for FY2006 (PDF; 369 KB)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Children and families, Consumer issues, Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.