Shaken baby syndrome is defined as a serious brain injury resulting from forcefully shaking an infant or toddler. What happens during shaken baby syndrome is that the child receives severe bruising and even bleeding in the brain causing permanent damage or death. Often times the care givers are brought to court and convicted based off of this diagnosis. However, the Frontline video on this issue showed that not all shaken-baby syndrome diagnosis are accurate enough to convict caregivers. In a recent article by Kristine Phillips, the shaken baby syndrome diagnosis of two baby girls sentenced two men to prison for murder. She writes about investigations into the deaths of the girls proving that shaken baby syndrome is not what killed the babies
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They often times are small or large bruises on the brain that indicate trauma and because the outside of the head is not injured the assumption is that the baby was shook hard enough to bruise the brain. The problem in most cases is that the medical examiners find it hard to believe that a person can physically shake a baby hard enough to cause this kind of bruising. According to Tara Haelle in an article on devising a better way to determine shaken baby syndrome, experts and pediatricians are finding that many shaken baby cases diagnosis are wrong and that the symptoms are usually caused by other medical conditions, falls, or accidents. Haelle also writes about a group of researchers who developed a method for determining whether the baby's injury was shaken baby syndrome or something else. The researchers found that 82 percent of 198 cases that have already been tried, were not from abusive caregivers (2015). The methods used to determine are simple they just ask the medical examiner to make several observations and look for a list of 6 key symptoms. The more symptoms the child has the more likely they suffered abuse. I find that these methods plus the including new requirements in investigating children's deaths could be effective in improving the accuracy of
They often times are small or large bruises on the brain that indicate trauma and because the outside of the head is not injured the assumption is that the baby was shook hard enough to bruise the brain. The problem in most cases is that the medical examiners find it hard to believe that a person can physically shake a baby hard enough to cause this kind of bruising. According to Tara Haelle in an article on devising a better way to determine shaken baby syndrome, experts and pediatricians are finding that many shaken baby cases diagnosis are wrong and that the symptoms are usually caused by other medical conditions, falls, or accidents. Haelle also writes about a group of researchers who developed a method for determining whether the baby's injury was shaken baby syndrome or something else. The researchers found that 82 percent of 198 cases that have already been tried, were not from abusive caregivers (2015). The methods used to determine are simple they just ask the medical examiner to make several observations and look for a list of 6 key symptoms. The more symptoms the child has the more likely they suffered abuse. I find that these methods plus the including new requirements in investigating children's deaths could be effective in improving the accuracy of