This December: Take a Bite out of SIDS

It’s been a tough year. This holiday season, please take the opportunity to stay home and stay safe, while enjoying a free lunch delivered right to your door – for a great cause.

Starting December 1st – Giving Tuesday – please join us to “Take a Bite out of SIDS.” 

Here’s how it works: enjoy as many free lunches as you like – for yourself or as gifts –along with a donation of $20 for each. The lunches are donated by Adobe and Accenture, and all proceeds benefit the Aaron Matthew SIDS Research Guild at Seattle Children's Hospital.

During this busy holiday season, having a lunch delivered to your door is a huge treat. And thanks to Grubhub, your lunch will be brought to you for free anywhere they deliver in the United States! Each donation of $20 gets you one free lunch and one free delivery. This offer is open to all residents of the United States, who may order for themselves or for friends and family.

Your donation, through “Take a Bite out of SIDS,” and throughout the year, makes a huge difference to the Aaron Matthew SIDS Research Guild. Thanks to our donors, we have made excellent progress in 2020 in our work to find the causes of sudden and unexplained infant deaths (SUID), which include SIDS. One way to understand the impact we’re having is through research papers submitted through Guild-funded collaborative research, led by the Center for Integrative Brain Research at Seattle Children’s, with the help of data scientists from Microsoft.

Over the next few months, the Seattle Children’s and our Microsoft AI for Health Data Scientists, will publish three new papers in medical journals. One, a follow-up on a paper they published earlier this year, will further examine risk factors of infants who pass away in the first week compared to those up to a year later. Another upcoming paper aims to determine factors associated with SUID by time of day. Yet another will look at the impact of a geography’s altitude as a risk factor. This research is incredibly important because the more we learn about risk factors, the more clues researchers gain in their quest to understand the underlying causes of SIDS. This knowledge will also help us better monitor at-risk infants, and to adjust their environments until they get stronger. It’s all about saving lives.

Another major development is our continuing work to sequence the genes of tissue samples of infants lost to SIDS. This will give us a crucial basis on which to begin genetic analyses. We plan to continue to expand this database through a number of different avenues, including archived tissue, other biorepositories, and beyond. That’s why donations are crucial to help sequence these additional tissues and advance our understanding from a genetic perspective. The larger the database, the more powerful the resulting analyses, and the closer we get to finding real answers.

The final critical development is our work on federal legislation. As we enter the final weeks of the 116th Congress, Scarlett’s Sunshine Act (H.R. 2271/S. 1130) is nearly across the finish line. The law would strengthen efforts to better understand these infant deaths, facilitate data collection and analysis to improve prevention efforts, and support children and families. Please take a moment to look at the piece that Molly Shen, of KOMO Television, did on the upcoming deadline for the bill. The Guild has been at the forefront of lobbying for the new law, by bringing together SIDS activists and researchers to encourage lawmakers to act.

To learn more about the progress we’ve made, please see our report from earlier this year. Thank you for your support. Have a great holiday season, and a happy new year!