Banner Graphic, Volume 12, Number 38, Greencastle, Putnam County, 21 October 1981 — Page 3

Sudden infant death syndrome link to carbon dioxide focus of research

By TERESA PITTS c. The Dallas Morning News OKLAHOMA CITY Sleep specialists are simulating a condition suspected of causing sudden infant death syndrome as a way to target high-risk infants. The process, which measures a sleeping infant’s response to increased amounts of carbon dioxide in the blood, is aimed at testing a theory that immature brain or nervous system functioning is one cause of SIDS, which kills 10,000 infants in the United States annually. The process is the newest diagnostic tool in an SIDS evaluation program that since April has identified 40 likely candidates for the syndrome, blamed for 100 infant deaths ini Oklahoma every year, said Montee Stahl, associate director of the Presbyterian Hospital Sleep Disorders Center. By feeding sleeping infants small doses of carbon dioxide through the nose, researchers simulate what occurs normally when an infant stops breathing, she said. "When breathing stops, the oxygen level of the blood lowers, and the level of CO2 in the blood increases,” she said. “When that happens, the body’s normal response is to kick in

Court will decide on death penalty for accomplices

C. 1981 N.Y. Times WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether the death penalty can be imposed on someone who, while a participant in events that led to a murder, was not the actual killer. The case is an appeal by a Florida man who has been sentenced to death for his role in a robbery-murder. While he helped plan the robbery and drove the getaway car, he was several hundred feet away when his accomplice shot the robbery victims and was not himself the killer. Under the law of Florida and most other states, a murder that occurs during the commission of a serious felony such as robbery or rape the socalled felony murder is legally equivalent to a murder in which the death of the victim was intended from the start. Florida law also provides that a person who is present during the commission of a crime and assists in carrying out the crime is a “principal” and is just as guilty as if he committed the entire crime himself. Lawyers for Earl Enmund, the defendant in Monday’s case, are arguing that capital punishment is such a “dispropor-

Italy inaugurates campaign to build dome over Pompeii

POMPEII, Italy (AP) - Italy launched an international “Project Pompeii’’ today to build a giant umbrella or dome over the 2,000-year-old ruins and save one of the world’s most popular tourist sites from the ravages of nature and mankind. Announcement of the SIOO million plan coincided with the retrieval in West Germany of six marble and bronze statuettes stolen three years ago from the often plundered city. Trying to drum up interest and funds for the project, Culture and Environment Minister Vincenzo Scotti is setting out today on a week-long trip to inaugurate major exhibits from the ancient Roman city in Washington, in Lille, France, and in Mexico City. “We have already lost a lot (from decay of the ruins). Humanity has lost a lot, which will never be recovered,” Scotti told an auditorium packed with archaeologists, local officials and members of the European Parliament. In the year A.D. 79, a blanket of volcanic ash and cinders from nearby Mount Vesuvius buried one of the Roman empire’s most bustling cities and its 20,000 inhabitants. In 1748, archaeologists unearthed the city and Germany’s classic writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe declared prophetically: “Of all the world’s catastrophes, none has provoked so much joy to successive generations ” Thieves also have plundered the city in nighttime incursions.

donate” penalty for a participant in a felony murder that it violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court applied a similar analysis in 1977 when, in Coker v. Georgia, it held that the Eighth Amendment barred capital punishment for the crime of rape. While several cases since then have given the court a chance to rule on the constitutionality of capital punishment for felony murder, the justices have never squarely addressed the question. The court, which has upheld capital punishment laws that contain various procedural safeguards, has suggested but never actually ruled that a murder must be intentional in order to warrant the death penalty. Monday’s case, Enmund v. Florida, No. 81-5321, could therefore produce one of the more important death penalty rulings in recent years. Should a majority of the justices rule that intent to murder must be proved before a death sentence can be imposed, capital punishment could be barred for most participants in most felony murders. Such a broad ruling is unlikely, however.

In 1978, a gang made off with six statuettes of cherubs and ducks from the archaeological museum. The statuettes had originally been in the House of Vetti, the most popular building of the 635,000-square-yard city. Col. Pio Alferano, of the Culture Ministry’s investigative paramilitary police section, tracked down the thieves in Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt and recovered the works. They had been cracked into pieces for easier smuggling out of the country. The coup de grace in Pompeii’s slow decay came last November, when the devastating southern Italian earthquake opened cracks in more than 100 buildings and forced officials to cordon off a large area from tourists. The dead city’s average 1.5 million visitors a year surpassed only by the Louvre in Paris as the world’s most visited monument dropped 35 percent. An emergency plan launched last February catalogued the 3,000 buildings of Pompeii and stored 170,000 files in a computer with the help of soldiers and Treasury employees. A second phase is scheduled to start in 1982, when reinforced steel rods will be driven into walls as supports and earth tremor detectors will be installed Scotti said in an interview that the last phase, to be overseen by an international scientific committee, would be to mount a protective roof over large parts of the city.

a backup system that stimulates breathing faster, deeper. “With some patients, however, as the CO2 levels get high, the ‘warning system’ is ignored by the brain. In adults, the cause is usually disease of some kind. But in infants, it’s usually immaturity,” she said. The CO2 doses are small and the baby’s regular breathing is not hampered, she said. Measuring infant response only recently was made possible by the marketing of a $35,000 computerized carbon dioxide analyzer, she said. SIDS babies are healthy infants, usually between 3 months old and 4 months old, who stop breathing suddenly during sleep. No single cause has been found, but data compiled in the last decade when researchers began linking the deaths point to the probability of several causes, Dr. William Orr, sleep center director, said. “It has been presumed for years that a SIDS baby is healthy, but that doesn’t make sense. Healthy babies don’t die,” he said. “All the data so far has pointed to subtle abnormalities, either working singly or in a combination. ” The tests are being conducted in a cooperative effort with

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SEC. JAMES WATT Protest mounts

Pilot of ill-fated plane had criticized rulings

HAZARD, Ky. (AP) - The pilot of a single-engine airplane that crashed in eastern Kentucky claiming his life and the lives of two passengers, had commented earlier in the day that new Feddral Aviation Administration regulations would create “...a lot of problems.” Killed in the Monday afternoon crash were pilot James Brewer, 39, and Robert Higgins, 36, both of Hazard, along with David Blankenship, 29, of Wooten. The aircraft, leased to the River Processing Coal Co. in Hazard, was returning to Hazard from Indianapolis when apparently one of the wings came off, police said.

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Congress gets Watt removal petitions

c. 1981 N.Y Times WASHINGTON - Environmental groups presented to Congress Monday more than one million petition signatures urging the removal of James Watt as interior secretary and said they would conduct a massive grass roots political effort next year against the administration’s policies. “We and millions of Americans believe Secretary Watt and his program are radically out of step with what our people want as our national policy toward natural resources and environment,” said Joseph Fontaine, president of the

Brewer had been interviewed earlier in the day by WLEX-TV at Lexington’s Bluegrass Field concerning new FAA regulations that went into effect Monday concerning instrument flying. Brewer said in the interview he could not get an instrument flight rule reservation, so he had to fly visual flight rules. The pilot of the doomed aircraft had told the television station the new flight regulations were going to present “...a lot of problems.” Since he could not get IFR reservation, Brewer said in the interview, his flight would be, “...low, slow, bumping and thrashing.”

Massachuesettes General Hospital in Boston, where the immature brain functioning theory was first proven, he said. “What we’re doing is collaborating with them in the use of a highly sophisticated piece of new equipment to see if, indeed, we can identify a group of ‘at risk’ babies by means of a depressed CO2 response curve,” he said. Another accepted theory behind SIDS death is that an abnormal response to food or other material gets into a baby’s esophagus, stopping breathing. While a normal baby might choke up the material to free its breathing passages, in a SIDS baby, the normal response might be lacking, he said. As part of the total SIDS evaluation, conducted with nearby Children’s Memorial Hospital, infants also are tested for this abnormality. The tested infants are those considered at some risk for SIDS either because they have a sibling who has died of SIDS or because they have experienced a breathing lapse that required vigorous stimulation or resuscitation by parents to revive them, Stahl said. Treatment for these infants includes medication, as well as home monitors that, when attached to a sleeping baby,

Sierra Club, which conducted the petition campaign, at a news conference on the Capitol steps. The bundles of petitions were presented to House speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. and Sen. Alan Cranston of California, the Senate Democratic whip. Rafe Pomerance, president of Friends of the Earth, said that while the petitions called for the removal of Watt, they also were directed at the environmental policies of the entire administration. “Watt is only the most visible operator of the Reagan environmental wrecking ball at

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work throughout the administration, said Pomerance. Douglas Baldwin, chief spokesman for Watt, said by telephone that the petition campaign were designed for the purpose of raising funds and increasing membership. Baldwin, who distributed a confidential Sierra Club memorandum giving the organization’s

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October 20,1981, The Putnam County Banner-Graphic

awaken parents if the child stops breathing. Just as the cause of SIDS is controversial, so is the treatment, she said. Statistically, home monitoring has not proven to influence the survival rate of large groups of high risk infants significantly, she said. “But who is to say what is ‘significant’? If a thousand babies were placed on monitors and one lived as a result, I would say that is significant. “To answer the question of usefulness of monitors on a scientific bases, you’d have to find a baby at high risk and not treat it,” she said. After the first week of life, SIDS is the greatest single cause of deaths among infants under a year old and ranks second, behind accidents, in the number of deaths of children under 15, she said. “The one encouraging aspect of SIDS is that the highest death rate occurs during the first six months of life and then declines significantly," she said. Distributed by the N.Y. Times News Service

plans for publicizing its campaign, said that the petition effort was an effort by environmentalists to “manipulate” the press and Congress. “I think this will help Secretary Watt, not hurt him,” Baldwin said. He added: “It strengthens the image of a man unfairly beaten upon by a small

clique of opponents. The interests these people represent are the interests that opposed everything the Reagan administration stands for. The environmentalists stated that they were not asking Congress to impeach Watt. “He’s done nothing impeachable,” said Pomerance.

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