A key state Senate committee will hold hearings in early 2018 to explore preventable causes of infant deaths, in part a response to an NJ Advance Media investigation into deaths that occur when parents share their beds with infants.

The announcement by the state Senate Health Committee Chairman Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, comes as latest statistics show 41 infants suffocated while sharing a bed in 2015 -- the largest percentage of bed-sharing deaths reported in the state in a single year.

The NJ Advance Media report found the New Jersey's Child Fatality and Near Fatality Review Board had sounded an alarm about bed-sharing deaths since 2000. The board every year urged hospitals to adopt standards to educate parents and medical professionals.

The fatality board also had blasted the medical examiners offices across the state for performing shoddy investigations into infant deaths, under-estimating how many babies die from bed-sharing and other potentially unsafe practices each year.

Vitale said the hearing would focus on the "environmental issues -- from the air babies breathe and where they sleep, to racial and socio-economic factors. Public safety and the place you live are key factors in raising a family safely."

Black infants and Latino infants are three times and 2.5 times more likely to die while sharing a bed, respectively, according to the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The statistics hold true for New Jersey as well, although overall New Jersey has among the lowest infant mortality rates in the nation, said SIDS Center Program Director Barbara Ostfeld.

Vitale said the hearings will focus on infant and maternal mortality rates, and the vast racial disparities that exist in New Jersey, prompted by media reports.

"As one of the wealthiest states in the nation by many standards, New Jersey's standing with regard to maternal and infant health is unacceptable," Vitale said.

"The Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee will hold hearings on these issues early in the new legislative session to make sure we are doing everything we can to make sure that women and babies in this state get the care they deserve."

The state's foremost authorities on infant mortality say most bed-sharing deaths -- averaging 1,000 a year in the nation and 31 in New Jersey -- are preventable. But some sharply disagree on the best strategy to educate the public about the seriousness of the problem.

A separate hearing is planned for next week on the Medical Examiners offices, the focus of an NJ Advance Media expose last week revealing that body parts have gone missing, an untold number of crimes have gone without investigation and potentially innocent people have been jailed.

Vitale, the sponsor of a long-ignored bill to overhaul the state Medical Examiner's Office, expressed confidence that with Gov.-elect Phil Murphy taking office in January and his vow to overhaul the agency, there would be "the resources and the will to do the right thing."

But tackling the infant mortality issue requires more exploration, he said.

The state's child fatality review board's latest report, quietly published on the Department of Children and Families website on Dec. 16, is one place to start.

The volunteer board, consisting of medical and mental health professionals and government and law enforcement officials, examined 137 child fatality cases from 2015, including 70 were classified as sudden unexpected and sleep-related infant deaths.

Forty-one of these 70 infants, or 59 percent, died sharing a bed, couch or some other sleeping surface with a parent or a sibling, according to the report. An NJ Advance Media analysis of data from child fatality reports dating back to 2005 found 2015 represented the highest percentage of bed-sharing deaths.

An unsafe sleep environment may be defined by a bassinet containing a blanket or toys that could accidentally smother the child, a home where smoking occurs, or a parent that does not place a baby on her back to sleep in her own bassinet -- standards set by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Complicating the issue is the philosophy widely shared across parenting blogs is that infants under 12 months are safer in the adult bed, where a spike in body temperature or a difficulty breathing could be more easily detected. Parents say they know how to "safely" be-share, by removing pillows and blankets, and refraining from alcohol or medication that may make it hard to wake up.

Thomas Hegyi, director of the SIDS Center of New Jersey, said the uptick of infant sleeping deaths "is not unexpected."

It's another sinister byproduct of New Jersey's heroin and prescription opioid epidemic, Hegyi said. Babies born drug-dependent are often born premature with health complications. And parents who are using opioids are more tires and less responsive to their baby's needs, he said.

"I was expecting this," Hegyi said.

Poverty is another insidious culprit behind infant deaths, Ostfeld said. She cited a 2016 statisical analysis in the American Journal for Public Health that compared state-by-state low-birth weight babies and infant mortality rates with minimum wage from 1980 to 2011.

The results: a dollar increase in the minimum wage above the federal level was associated with a 1 percent to 2 percdent decrease in low birth-weight babies and a 4 percent decrease in infant deaths.

"Poverty rears its head in a million ways," Ostfeld said.

Beyond addressing income disparity and addiction, the Murphy adminstration or the Legislature could tackle the issue more directly by requiring hospitals to teach their staff and parents the basics of safe sleep, Ostfeld and Hegyi said.

Hospitals "care very deeply and want to do the right thing, but there isn't a regulation, like there is to teach breast feeding and using a car seat. When you have a regulation, you start to see more consistant standards," said Ostfeld, who travels to hospitals, clinics and child welfare offices to teach safe sleep techniques year-round.

Kathryn McCans, the chairwoman of the child fatality board since 2015, said she, too, is concerned about infants dying needlessly. Under her leadership in January, New Jersey became the first state to distribute "Baby Boxes" -- a bassinett-sized laminated cardboard box with a mattress and fitted sheet for any parent who watches a safe-sleep educational video.

The state won't know whether the baby boxes prevented parents from sharing a bed with their infants until fatality board's report in 2019, when 2017 data will be available, McCans said. But with more than 20,000 boxes in circulation, she said she is hopeful.

"We educated a lot of people this year," she said.

But McCans, an emergency room pediatrician at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, doesn't agree with Ostfeld's and Hegyi's idea of forcing "another unfunded mandate" on hospitals.

McCans encouraged the SIDS Center to develop a teaching model and make it available to every hospital. Ostfeld said a mobile phone application is already under construction that hospitals will be able to share with new parents before they take their babies home.

Hegyi said the American Academy of Pediatrics will not accept the baby box model as a reliable means to prevent unsafe sleep until the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission can verify it is safe.

"There's no sense in supporting wishful thinking," he said.

Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook