Friday, June 15, 2007

More on Kaleb Schwade and SBS

Just wanted to add Kaleb is not my son. He is Kristy and Josh's son. I do not know the family, I was just touched by the story because my daughter is 2 days younger than Kaleb.

I found some statistics on here and on here I thought I would share them with you all.

-15% of children's deaths are due to battering and shaking
-15% more are from possible cases of battering or shaking
-The average age of a SBS victim is 6 months old
-More than 60% are male
-Almost 80% of the perpetrators are male
-50% of offenders are the parents
-17% are non relatives
-17% are the mothers boyfriend
-10% are Other
-6% are step parents
-2/3rds of the victims will die or suffer 1 or more permanent disabilities
-medical cost from the initial incident - the first 5 years can range from $300,000-$1,000,000.
-25-50% of Americans don't realize the dangers of shaking a baby, or the long term effects
-3 seconds of shaking is all it take to cause irreparable damage and death
-1 in 4 babies that go to the hospital will die. The other 3 will have irreparable damage such as retardation, cerebral palsy, seizures, paralysis, learning disabilities and that's just a few.

Shaking babies is dangerous because their necks are too weak to support the heavy head, and the baby's brain and blood vessels are fragile. When a baby is shaken the brain bounces all over the skull ripping away the blood vessels that connect it to the skull. Blood then pools in the skull causing irreparable brain damage.

Kristy now has over 74,000 friends and it grows by thousands each and every day. All of these people are telling people who are telling people, etc. Its amazing how the word is getting out about little Kaleb's story! Its on myspace, its in Blogs, Yahoo groups, cafe mom, snopes.com, ...its literally everywhere! All of this for one very special little boy and a deserving family.

Shaken Baby syndrome is preventable! NEVER NEVER SHAKE A BABY. Put them somewhere safe and WALK AWAY for a few minutes and CALM DOWN!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It would seem to be common sense not to shake a helpless baby. They are for kissing and and caring. Michele sent me.

Teresa said...

It just makes me cringe and I can hardly stand reading these statistics. Makes me SO SAD that this happens to babies. It's also so sad that these people loose control for just a couple seconds and can cause such terrible damage. Just thinking of these precious little ones makes me want to go hold TS!