Dr. James Kemp, a St. Louis pediatrician specializes in kids' lungs, and particularly how they breathe and sometimes stop breathing, in their sleep.

He’s been working to understand the causes of sudden unexplained infant deaths for nearly three decades. He believes firmly that if more consistent and thorough investigations were made of infant deaths, including the sleep environment, many more deaths would be attributed to suffocation in a shared bed, or due to bedding that smothered the baby.

Investigations in St. Louis and elsewhere show greater emphasis on safe sleep environments can save babies, but the jumble of national data makes it hard to make his case and hard to design interventions.

“Most of the progress we’ve made with infant deaths in 30 years has had to do with the sleep environment, but the lack of death scene investigations and the uncertainty of findings is holding us back,” he said.

“It’s very frustrating. Most of the time SIDS doesn’t have to be a mystery if everyone does their job with the investigation.”