The Dark History of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

In 1848, fifteen-year-old Hannah Greener of Newcastle, United Kingdom died minutes after being administered chloroform anesthetic for the removal of a toenail. As increasing reports of ‘sudden deaths’ during surgeries would make headlines and appear in medical journals throughout the late 19th century, this became a springboard to search for a ’cause’–other than chloroform.

In 1889, A. Paltauf of Vienna proposed that the cause for these “sudden deaths” was the result of an ‘enlarged thymus’ that could cause suffocation or strangulation at a moment’s notice–in young, healthy people. He coined this condition: status thymico lymphaticus. It was immediately widely accepted.

Each time a young person would die suddenly, especially during medical procedures, like the son of German Professor Paul Langerhans who died instantly after his father gave him Diphtheria antitoxin in 1896: the answer would be status lymphaticus.

Doctors began treating infants and children for this “condition”. Surgery came first, but removing the ‘enlarged thymus’ had a fatality rate of about 33%, or 1 in 3 patients. This operation was performed on completely healthy children who had nothing wrong with them.

In 1907, the first child was treated with X-ray for status lymphaticus. It was a “success” and irradiation treatment became the treatment of choice. Every textbook of the period recommended this therapy, and it was suggested that all newborn babies should be irradiated as a prophylactic measure.

There was only one slight problem. It turned out to be deadly.

In 1925, Dr. C. Winfield Perkins wrote: “Many of the sudden deaths occurring during chloroform and ether anaesthesia have proved to be due to status lymphaticus.”

The cadavers used to determine the “normal” thymus size were from the poor, most having died of highly stressful chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis, infectious diarrhea, and malnutrition, which causes the thymus to shrink. The “normal” thymus glands of the poor were abnormally small. Because the autopsied thymus glands of the poor were regarded as normal in size, the SIDS-affected infants were erroneously believed to have thymic enlargement.

The thyroid gland, which is highly sensitive to irradiation, sits close to the thymus. The increased risk of thyroid malignancy in the patients who had undergone thymic irradiation was first recognized in 1949. The patients subjected to thymic radiation “therapy” also experienced higher rates of breast cancer.

From the 1910s to the late 1950s, tens of thousands of infants around the world were treated with high doses of cancer-causing ionizing radiation for ‘enlarged thymus’. X-ray therapy became the standard protocol for a wide range of childhood ailments, including noisy breathing, cough, runny nose, wheezing in the chest, birth marks, moles, tonsillitis, asthma, ear infections, ringworm and cystic acne.

More than 10,000 deaths caused by thyroid cancer resulted from this treatment

Irradiation therapy would take place in hospitals, at doctors offices, and even at school clinics. It would be decades before they realized they were causing cancer.

At Massachusetts General Hospital, doctors treated 5,000 children with X-rays for enlarged thymus, giving them 200-400 rads, which is equivalent to the peak radiation level recorded inside Fukushima plant, or the level of radiation used as criterion for relocating residents after the Chernobyl accident.

67,000 children in Maryland underwent nasal radium treatments in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

A study looking at 2,809 children treated with X-rays for thymic enlargement in an upstate New York County between 1926 and 1957 found that the treated children had a high incidence of tumors, particularly leukemia and thyroid neoplasms.

Another study looking at 2,657 infants in Rochester, New York who received thymic irradiation found that they had 7 times the cancer as their sibling controls.

Women exposed to this irradiation treatment as infants for enlarged thymus had 3 times the rate of breast cancer, and a 5-fold increase in thyroid cancer.

By 1965, medical journals no longer included the condition known as status lymphaticus.

Clinical use of chloroform ceased in 1976, the same year the US Environmental Protection Agency listed it as a carcinogen.