By THOMAS HARGROVE and LEE BOWMAN
Scripps Howard News Service

PITTSBURGH -- Child-safety advocates assembled here Friday to consider reform measures, including new federal legislation, to improve the investigation and prevention of sudden infant death.

Among the attendees in the nation's first "Safe Sleep Summit" were top aides to Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who is working on legislation that would advance how infant-death investigations are conducted and to prepare a new national campaign to teach parents how to better protect their babies while they sleep.

"We need to learn more about the causes of sudden infant deaths -- and what we can do to prevent them," Lautenberg said in a statement issued from Washington. "By working with these health-care professionals and advocates, we can craft a bill that gives parents the tools to keep children safe."

The conference is considering endorsing recommendations for new standards for death-scene investigations, independent reviews of the findings of the probes, and a new federal "case registry" to report how and why babies die.

Every year, between 4,000 and 5,000 infants die mysteriously in the United States, often characterized as having succumbed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

The summit follows a recent series of stories by Scripps Howard News Service documenting widespread inconsistency across the country in the way unexplained infant deaths are investigated and classified. Conference organizers said the national reporting project, "Saving Babies," helped inspire the conference to seek solutions.

More than 200 federal epidemiologists, state and local child-death-review specialists and parents who lost babies attended the conference, sponsored by Cribs for Kids, a national organization based in Pittsburgh. The nonprofit group is dedicated to safe-sleep education and to providing new cribs to families to ensure babies are able to sleep alone in a proper baby bed.

Dr. Carrie Shapiro-Mendoza, a leading infant-death researcher with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, outlined plans for a new national registry of sudden unexplained infant deaths that would capture much more detailed information than the current flawed system of reports from death certificates.

"Our hope is to tap into child-death-review records to capture information on all infant and child deaths, while allowing us to focus on risk factors like sleep environment for infants no matter whether the cause of death has been specified or is SIDS,'' Shapiro-Mendoza told the conference.

At the conference, Theresa Covington, director of the National Child Death Review Policy Center based in Okemos, Mich., called for new efforts to expand the amount and quality of scrutiny each child's death receives. She wants every state to have local teams who will consider why young children die.

"Reviewers can find out what went wrong and how to fix it," Covington said. "This is not about assigning blame."

The gathering was emotionally difficult for some participants. Jenny Slattery, 29, of Pittsburgh, wept quietly when Cribs for Kids officials unveiled public service announcements showing cheerful mothers of newborns learning safe sleeping practices.

"It was hard to see that mother talking about how happy a baby makes you feel," said Slattery, whose son, 5-month-old Colin, died of SIDS in 2005. "But it's nice to see that they are getting the message out. SIDS can happen to anyone."

Mindy Rose, 34, of Imperial, Pa., lost her only daughter, Abigail, to sudden infant death six months ago and had a similar warning.

"I assumed SIDS was genetic or racial. People think it will never happen to them. It had never happened in my own family," Rose said. "So I got involved (in the campaign) to help other parents."

Even in communities where officials recognize and publicize the importance of safe sleeping techniques, some parents continue to miss the message.

Another conference attendee was Christine Bert, a public health nurse from the Omaha, Neb., area, where six infants have been identified by review teams as having died from suffocation after sleeping with other family members.

Yet local officials have been aggressively promoting safe sleeping practices for several years, and Nebraska lawmakers passed a law mandating such education in birthing hospitals two years ago.

Officially, though, most infant deaths in Douglas County have been classified as SIDS, although a new county coroner has pledged to adjust the classifications.

"So when we talk to the moms who lost babies about safe sleep, they tell us, 'They said it was SIDS, that I didn't do anything wrong, so why should I do anything different with the next baby,' '' Bert said.

"We have to explain to them that things like smoking around the baby and bed-sharing increase the risk of both SIDS and suffocation, but it's a hard message to get through, as we're seeing," Bert said. "We're hoping to come away from the meeting with some new approaches."