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Plunket New Zealand says a new study that identifies smoking as a major factor in cot death is not surprising.
The study, by Bristol University's Institute of Child Life and Health, has found that nine out of 10 mothers whose babies died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Sids)
had smoked during pregnancy.
It says women who smoke during pregnancy are four times more likely than non-smokers to see their child fall victim to cot death.
Plunket national nursing clinical adviser Brenda Hynes said the study was not surprising because it supported the advice Plunket had been giving families to be smoke free while pregnant and around their home and car.
"This research confirms what we have probably known for a while about the link between smoking and pregnancy and Sids."
The number of children dying of Sids each year in New Zealand has been dropping, which Ms Hynes said was attributed to advice given to parents about placing sleeping children on their backs.
"But we still do have children who are dying of Sids and so this [study] is again contributing ... to information of what can cause Sids, and therefore what we can do to prevent it."
Plunket also advised smokers not to sleep with their babies for the first six months of life, parents to let no one smoke near a baby or pregnant mother, and mothers not to smoke while breast feeding their babies.
The study, co-authored by Peter Fleming, a professor of infant health and developmental physiology, and senior research fellow Dr Peter Blair, is based on analysis of the evidence of 21 international studies on smoking and cot death.
It is about to be published in the medical journal Early Human Development.
The British newspaper the Independent on Sunday, which published part of the study, said it was thought that the rise in the proportion of Sids mothers who smoked was at least partly a result of advice given to parents since the early 1990s about sleeping babies on their backs.
With this factor taken out of the equation, one of the main dangers that remained was exposure to smoke, the report said.
This study follows one by American scientist Hannah Kinney, released last year, which found that babies who died from cot death had an abnormality in the part of the brain that controls breathing, arousal and other reflexes.
The New Zealand Health Ministry's chief adviser on child and youth health, Pat Tuohy, said at the time that the part of the brain Dr Kinney identified was particularly susceptible to effects from nicotine, which indicated a link to smoking.
"I can see a pattern emerging that something happens during pregnancy that damages the babies' ability to respond to those sort of difficult situations when they're asleep.
"It is quite possible that one of the underlying causes of this is smoking during pregnancy."
The latest ministry figures showed 45 babies died from Sids in New Zealand in 2004, six fewer than the previous year.
- NZPA
