Pacifiers May Reduce the Risk of SIDS

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is terrible for the family. I can't imagine my sweet little baby girl suddenly dying. A study has been reported in the Scientific American :

"Pacifiers aren't just for soothing colicky babies anymore. A new study has found that use of a pacifier during sleep reduced the chances of a baby suffering from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) by 90 percent. Furthermore, pacifiers eliminated the increased risk associated with babies who slept on their stomach or in soft bedding--factors that have been shown to increase the risk of SIDS as much as 10-fold.
"A baby who sleeps on his stomach without a pacifier has a 2.5 times greater risk of SIDS," explains De-Kun Li, a reproductive epidemiologist with Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif., who led the research. "If you use a pacifier, that baby's risk disappears." The work draws on interviews with 185 mothers of SIDS babies and 312 mothers of control infants collected between 1997 and 2000. "