ABSTRACT
This distressing condition has a variety of names and abbreviations. The one now most generally accepted is the ‘sudden death in infancy syndrome’, often shortened to (and pronounced as) ‘SIDS’. An older title was ‘SUD’, standing for ‘sudden unexpected death’, but this in itself did not denote the infant connotations. Colloquially, SIDS is known as ‘cot death’ in Britain and ‘crib death’ in North America.
