TAMPA, Fla. — Baby Bellamy is ready for Halloween.
She's 11 months old, and Melissa Garitta said she is loving every bit of being a first-time mom.
“Just watching those milestones. Seeing her grow from that first smile to those giggles, eating for the first time solid food to now crawling and pulling herself up,” said Garitta, who also works at Tampa Family Health Centers.
Garitta said when she first brought Bellamy home, she knew the basics of safe sleeping but learned more along the way.
“You know, you are overwhelmed. You’ve got this brand new baby and being reassured that as long as our baby is on her back, alone in the crib, we knew that she was safe,” said Garitta.
The Children's Board of Hillsborough County says 198 infants have died in the last nine years from unsafe sleep.
That can mean suffocation from blankets or pillows or co-sleeping in their parents' bed.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says the number one cause of injury-related deaths for infants is suffocation or strangulation in adult beds. Infants are 40 times more likely to die in an adult bed than in their own crib.
“Unsafe sleep deaths are 100% preventable, so we consider it an epidemic because one death is too many,” said Lisa Colen with the Healthy Start Coalition.
She is part of the Infant Safe Sleep CEO roundtable that met on Tuesday.
Their goal is to figure out more ways to educate people on keeping their babies safe.
“We want parents to be comfortable that a baby will cry. It’s okay, let them cry. They are not going to die from crying," said Colen. "Put them alone. Put them on their back. Put them in a safe crib with nothing in it."
That includes blankets.
“They actually run at a higher metabolic rate than we do, and so the best temperature for them is much cooler than what we sleep in. They don’t need the blankets and the covers and the pillows that we do,” said Colen.
It’s common practice for health professionals to advise new parents on safe sleeping practices, usually before they leave the hospital.
But Hillsborough County’s Medical Examiner saw nine infants die last year related to unsafe sleep.
She’s also seen what it does to the parents.
“There’s a lot of stigma and guilt on the part of the families when this happens, and then the law enforcement comes in. The death investigator, the doctors come in,” said Chief Medical Examiner Kelly Garland Devers.
“Every family looks the same to me in that they are devastated. They don’t get past anything like this that has happened. I think there’s enough guilt to go around. It just really destroys a family,” said Colen.
Again, one death is too many. And the roundtable is working to make sure everyone knows the ABCs of infant sleeping:
- A: alone
- B: on their back.
- C: in their crib.
For more information, go to preventneedlessdeaths.com.
