There was some reasonable doubt there was a genetic fault with the girls, too. The research just isn't as far advanced as the male research.
An unintended pun?
Not fair I know I just got a kick out of seeing it. Plenty of male gendered members in this thread recognize the scientific/medical evidence.
Here's NPR's take:
An Australian mother jailed 20 years is pardoned and freed because of new evidence
Evidence discovered in 2018 that both daughters carried a rare CALM2 genetic variant was one of the reasons that the inquiry was called....
Bathurst has conducted the second inquiry into Folbigg's guilt, initiated by a petition that said it was "based on significant positive evidence of natural causes of death" and signed by 90 scientists, medical practitioners and related professionals.
Hardly a PR campaign.
SIDS is a diagnosis of exclusion allowing a number of diagnoses which are not SIDS to be diagnosed as SIDS anyway. The 4 kids in this case didn't seem to have the same illness. Seeing it claimed multiple times in this thread that there were 4 SIDS deaths bugged me. And it turned out there were not 4 cases of SIDS just like I posted above.
From Wiki
CALM2:
Mutations in CALM2 are associated with cardiac arrhythmias.[6] In particular, several single-nucleotide polymorphisms of CALM2 have been reported as potential causes of sudden infant death syndrome. Due to their heritability, CALM2 mutations can affect multiple children in a family,[7] and the discovery of the deadly consequences of these mutations has led to challenges against the murder convictions of mothers of multiple deceased infants
Novel Calmodulin (CALM2) Mutations Associated with Congenital Arrhythmia Susceptibility
Background
Genetic predisposition to life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias such as in congenital long-QT syndrome (LQTS) and catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) represent treatable causes of sudden cardiac death in young adults and children. Recently, mutations in calmodulin (CALM1, CALM2) have been associated with severe forms of LQTS and CPVT, with life-threatening arrhythmias occurring very early in life. Additional mutation-positive cases are needed to discern genotype-phenotype correlations associated with calmodulin mutations.
Long QT is one of those arrhythmias that sadly results in kids dying after being hit in the chest during sports like baseball. If you jolt the heart when it is in the QT phase you can cause it to fibrillate. The persons can be saved if properly resuscitated in the field.
The clinical severity among subjects in this series was generally less than that originally reported for CALM1 and CALM2 associated with recurrent cardiac arrest during infancy.
Twenty years ago medicine wasn't advanced enough to have recognized arrhythmias in these infants but I still find considerable fault with the pediatricians to not have instituted some kind of follow-up with this family.
And yeah, not only do mothers feel guilt, everyone was telling this mother she was guilty. It's not a sign of guilt no matter what she wrote in her diary in the depressed state she must have been in.
You note,
lionking your incredulity that 4 deaths in one family was likely. Are you aware of the statistics on false confessions in court cases?
Also you said
lk said:
Well she is still guilty. She’s been released but the convictions still stand.
when she was actually pardoned.
So now what are the odds the other 2 kids died of SIDS vs some other genetic arrhythmia that went undiagnosed? That's some pretty bad luck for a family, 2 SIDS deaths
and 2 genetic-based deaths.
Even if we didn't know if the boys had a different anomaly,
would the conviction be doubtful if one could only say 2 SIDS deaths in one family? Do those odds suggest maternal guilt?
I should like to point out one more thing that needs saying. Anyone remember "refrigerator moms" that supposedly caused autism and homosexuality?
Why we like to blame parents (mostly moms) for whatever is ailing their kids
Not a new blame game
Of course, as Washington, D.C., child psychiatrist (and young mom) Dr. Justine Larson points out in a recent guest blog for Scientific American, blaming moms for their children’s medical conditions is nothing new. “Historically, parents have tended to be blamed even by medical professionals when there is a set of symptoms not fully understood by science,” she notes.
Women and blacks often get the raw end of the medical deal which is one reason it really bugs me when I see it.
ETA the original research (posted above as well) into the mother's and kids' genomes in this case. It's pretty conclusive, not just "possible":
Infanticide vs. inherited cardiac arrhythmias
Whole genomes or exomes of the mother and her four children were sequenced. ...
This study identifies a novel and functional calmodulin variant (CALM2 G114R) present in a mother convicted of infanticide and her two female children.
Biochemical and electrophysiological studies of the G114R variant show that it has deleterious effects on calcium binding and regulation of the two pivotal calcium channels involved in cardiac excitation contraction coupling, CaV1.2 and RyR2, in a similar manner to that of the pathogenic G114W and N98S variants.
Given the biophysical and functional impact of the CALM2 G114R variant, we consider the variant likely precipitated the natural deaths of the two female children (Child 3 and 4).
The two male children (Child 1 and 2) carried biallelic rare missense variants in BSN, a gene shown to cause early onset lethal epilepsy in mice when deleted.
