Sir.—As coroner of Jefferson County, Louisville, which is the largest county in Kentucky, we have actively investigated and done research in sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) for the past 13 years. During that time we have done our own research on several probable causes and fairly well ruled out all of them. These have included botulism, of which we found not one case; hyperthyroidism, which proved to be invalid; and the gliosis problem in the brain stem, which has yielded no useful findings. Basically, this puts us right back where we started years ago as far as SIDS is concerned.
We have been monitoring infants in our county for ten years or more, and our findings are that it has not affected our infant mortality one iota. We still have the same number of deaths by SIDS in our county, and in our state for that matter, as we