Medics advise: do not share bed with your baby

Department of Health advises parents not to share bed with their newborns. The updated advice on avoiding cot death follows medical research in The Lancet showing that bed-sharing could be unsafe for infants in the first eight weeks of life.

The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID) also updated its advice alerting parents of the risks.

Its new leaflet, distributed to all maternity units in England, includes the advice: "The safest place for your baby to sleep is in a cot in your room for the first six months.

"While it's lovely to have your baby with you for a cuddle or a feed, it's safest to put your baby back in their cot before you go to sleep."

The leaflet also emphasises the risk of sleeping in bed with a baby if you are a smoker, even if you never smoke in bed, and includes existing advice for cutting the risk of cot death by placing babies on their back to sleep, cutting out smoking and making sure the baby does not get too hot.

Cot death - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) - claims the lives on average of seven babies a week in Britain.

The Lancet study investigated 745 cot death cases alongside known risk factors, reports telegraph.co.uk

The new leaflet includes the advice: "The safest place for your baby to sleep is in a cot in your room for the first six months. "While it's lovely to have your baby with you for a cuddle or a feed, it's safest to put your baby back in their cot before you go to sleep." The leaflet also emphasises the risk of sleeping in bed with a baby if you are a smoker, even if you never smoke in bed. And it includes existing advice for cutting the risk of cot death such as placing babies on their back to sleep, cutting out smoking and making sure the baby does not get too hot. The Lancet study looked at 745 cot death cases alongside the known risk factors.

The researcher, part of the European Concerted Action on SIDs, found that six out of 10 of all cot death cases in Europe could probably be attributed to lying babies on their front or side, inform belfasttelegraph.co.uk