About thirty years ago I sat at lunch at the Hilton with a remarkable woman named Kaaren Fitzgerald. Her baby had died. Back then they called it ‘cot death’ and nobody knew what caused it.

Kaaren wanted my help as she started an organisation called SIDS. An acronym for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It tried to put some rational scientific and medical information out there for grieving mums and dads.

Many were feeling guilty, feeling that they had contributed to their baby’s death when theories were being bandied around. Often recklessly. They had left a window open. They had a dirty house and the baby had been killed by almost invisible dust mites. The pillow was wrong. The diet was wrong.

It all added to what must be the worst nightmare in a young parent’s life.

Well, now there is not only SIDS there is SADS. Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome especially involving young, fit, athletic males who for no apparent reason just drop dead.

No previous heart condition. No brain aneurism, no history of health problems.  It has been discussed around 3AW in recent weeks for tragic, obvious reasons, with the sudden unexplained death of our own Clinton Grybas. There is still no official verdict on how Clinton died.

I was asked ‘What do you know about adult male SIDS’. And I confessed I knew nothing. Coincidentally I received an e-mail overnight from a mother whose 22-year-old son died, as she said ‘a fit and strong young man, at 22, in the year 2005 at Xmas – and we now call the 25th of December, sudden death.’

There was a story about Sudden Arrhythmia Death on the 7.30 Report on the ABC last night detailing several cases of a young footballer and a young volunteer fire-fighter who died from no apparent cause.

And I heard from friends today about a 26-year-old newsreader in Norway who died and it was described as ‘grown up SIDS’.

To make things worse in these cases, as one grieving mother found, out there are always the whispers of suicide or drug-taking when a healthy young man is dead and nobody can fathom out why.

Thursday, February 7, 2008