From Rioch Edwards-Brown, The Five Percenters
Jennian Geddes’s study on shaken baby syndrome (16 June, p 4) is an important breakthrough for families wrongly accused of shaking, whom our organisation represents.
Imaging techniques and clinical investigations cannot distinguish with certainty between accidental and inflicted injury. And deciding on the cause of death is even more difficult when, as sometimes happens, a parent admits shaking their baby in an attempt to revive it.
We call ourselves The Five Percenters because some doctors say that shaken baby syndrome is the correct diagnosis in 95 per cent of cases, but not in the other 5 per cent.
Our organisation gives information and advice to families who say they have been wrongly accused of shaken baby syndrome. We have collected data on 115 families in Britain and 43 in the US, and work with legal teams and other health professionals involved in investigations of alleged SBS.
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We have also been contacted by doctors who say they have been pressured into diagnosing SBS when they felt that the cause was something else. We are now looking for funding to collate our data and help change the way SBS is diagnosed.
During our research we have found several other possible causes of the injuries commonly associated with SBS. These include non-malicious shaking, undiagnosed birth trauma, infection, accident, bone, blood and metabolic disorders, cot death and undiagnosed vaccine damage.
Shaken baby syndrome remains a poorly researched condition that embraces a range of symptoms, and the interpretation of those symptoms sets parents against doctors with appalling consequences for all concerned.
London
