I haven't seen much written about sudden infant death recently but here is a good paper from Bristol. A nice simple case-control design and a clear message.
There was a huge drop in postneonatal death from about 1985 - see this graph. Further reductions, but less dramatic, followed the 1991 'Back to sleep' campaign. Case control studies had shown a problem with babies being placed on their tummies. Cases of sudden infant death were far more likely than controls to have been laid to sleep prone. Hence the 'Back to sleep' campaign.
You may wonder why anyone would put a baby to sleep on its tummy. The answer is that in the 1960s had shown that very premature babies do badly when placed on their backs. This finding, from intensive care units, was unwsiely - indeed fatally - generalised to all babies as general advice to parents. I guess we'd need a historian to document fully quite how this happened. But for now the moral is clear: when you interpret research, be very careful about the situation to which the research does, and does not, apply.
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