A five month old baby boy by the name of Bodhi lived in Hawke's Bay, and in October 2022 was found unresponsive in his sleeping pod. The sleeping pod was placed inside the cot. He was lying on his stomach. He had blankets around his face. His parents, distraught, immediately called emergency services, but he could not be revived and we lost Bodhi. And after these losses, of course, coroners then look into it. And we've had a coroner look into it and found that Bodhi's death was likely caused by suffocation or re breathing and pointed out the risk factors that Bodhi was experiencing: sleeping on his tummy, loose blankets, and the use of a soft sleeping pod. Experts say babies this young cannot lift their heads to clear their airways, so if you're on your tummy, you've got some loose blankets and you've got these soft sleeping pods all over the place, they can suffocate.  

The coroner is now urging urgent action to prevent similar deaths. She's called on MBIE, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, to work with the Ministry of Health to introduce clear safety standards for infant sleep products like sleep pods, which apparently at the moment currently face no specific regulation in New Zealand. She says they could use the unsafe goods notices under the Fair Trading Act to restrict or remove dangerous products from the market. She's basically saying it's the sleeping pod, the sleeping pod is dangerous, and experts agree as well. Many of these sleeping pods are actually sold as lounges, but they're also of course sold for sleep, and all the experts say we need some stronger warnings and potentially an outright ban.  

And of course the coroner came out and said the obvious thing, she wants better education for parents whose health providers are encouraged to actively discourage the use of these products, right? So remember your guidelines, I still remember them from 25 years ago when I was looking after babies: always put your babies on their backs, always put them on a firm, flat surface, don't have loose blankets or soft items around them, and avoid unapproved sleep devices altogether.  

Have we just forgotten how to do this very basic thing? Because we've had talkback about this, sudden infant death syndrome, cot deaths, for ages, but then suddenly we have not. Put it this way, back in the 1980s, we used to have about 250 public health campaigns a year about how to put baby to bed. These days we have about 50 – that is a huge cut in public health campaigns. Can you remember the last time you saw an ad in a paper or on the telly or on the radio saying look after baby, put baby to sleep on back? And the thing I remember from back in the day was swaddling, making sure that baby is securely wrapped, restraining their movement, preventing them from rolling on their tummy and preventing the blankets to go and block their noses and their mouths. Have we forgotten this?