When Stephanie Zarecky's daughter Scarlett was about 16 months old, she and her husband put her to bed with a mild cold and fever. Hours later, they discovered she had stopped breathing. Doctors had no explanation for what happened, and even now, going on two years since she lost Scarlett, Zarecky has no more information on what happened to her daughter. Infants and children like Scarlett die from unexplained causes at an alarming rate in the United States — but soon, Scarlett's Sunshine Act could begin a unified quest for some answers.
This category of death is called Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (SUDC), or Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID) when it happens to infants under 12 months old (SIDS, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, falls under the SUID umbrella). Per the CDC, in 2016, 445 children fell under the SUDC category while 3,600 died under the SUIC category. A death is classified in this way if a thorough investigation — including an investigation at the scene of the death, an autopsy, and a dive into the family's medical records — reveals nothing, as happened in Scarlett's case.
“When you determine a cause, then you can do tests, and then you have results, and then you have answers," Zarecky tells Bustle. "Whereas in the case of SUDC and in particular of Scarlett, the answer is that there is no answer.”
[For more on this story by LANI SEELINGER, go to https://www.bustle.com/p/scarl...olution-yet-13168147]
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