Winnipeg Free Press

10 November 1999

*SIDS - smoking link unproven

After I had read Tom Oleson's column Moral Fanatics Blow Smoke, I went to the Internet to see what the "evidence" linking second -hand smoke really shows. The bottom line is that coincidence is not causality. In the case of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) it's not even much of a coincidence because the vast majority of babies who die of SIDS were babies of non-smoking parents.

Tom Keens of the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, who was a member of the Fleming Study that supposedly linked SIDS with second-hand smoke, said on the SIDS internet site in response to a question whether toxins from cigarette smoke could be detected at an autopsy of a SIDS baby:

"I don't think so. There is one substance, cotine, which is sometimes analyzed, usually in research studies, to assess the amount of cigarette smoking one has done. I do not know if this is sensitive enough to be elevated in passive smoking. Also this is not a substance which in and of itself is toxic or dangerous. Therefore, I expect few or any coroners to measure it. Even if they did, the significance of an elevated cotine would only be that the baby had been exposed to some cigarette smoke. It would say nothing about if or how that might have contributed to death."

As a member of the Fleming Study that anti-smoking activists have used to link second-hand smoke with SIDS, Tom Keens was quoted in the Los Angeles Times (July 26,1998): "Clearly Prof. Fleming is not saying cigarette smoking is the cause of SIDS. Like with prone sleeping, babies of families where there has been no cigarette smoking continue to die from SIDS, and most babies born into families where one or both parents smoke will not die. So cigarette smoking is not the cause of SIDS."

Warren Klass,
Winnipeg