and his team argued that the surveillance saved the lives of many of the children involved, and Professor Southall himself said that "By doing covert video surveillance we are betraying the trust of parents... but if a parent has been abusing his or her child in this way then the trust between child and parent has already gone." The concerns of a campaigning group of parents accused of abuse, a small proportion of parents involved in the ventilator study described below and their advocates, including a woman who was imprisoned subsequently for conspiracy to abduct a child, led to an investigation of Professor Southall’s child protection work, in particular covert video surveillance, by his employer the North Staffordshire Hospital. The campaigning group called themselves MAMA (Mothers Against Munchausen syndrome by proxy Allegations). The investigation by his employing hospital cleared Professor Southall. In the early 1990s, Professor Southall led a randomised controlled study which pioneered continuous negative extrathoracic pressure therapy (CNEP), a non-invasive treatment for breathing difficulties in infants and young children involving the application of negative pressure to the patients' chests. The technique was found to reduce the duration of chronic lung disease in premature newborn infants and to reduce the need for intensive care in infants with bronchiolitis, a common and dangerous chest infection. This study was criticised by the MAMA campaigning group described above, with some parents of the children involved suggesting that the treatment was linked to subsequent death or brain injury of their children. Based on these allegations, the research was also the subject of investigations by the North Staffordshire Hospital which again found no wrongdoing or harmful effects of the treatment. An independent follow-up study concluded in 2006 that there was "no evidence of disadvantage, in terms of long-term disability or psychological outcomes" from the use of the technique. The infants treated were all very premature babies in whom mortality and morbidity was expected, but there were no differences between study infants and control infants in this regard in the independent follow up study conducted. The long "saga" to discredit the researchers, perpetuated by constant media exposure, caused “widespread unpredictable damage”. In November 2005, Southall retired from Keele University and his honorary status as professor there came to an end; they did not award him an emeritus professorship (for reasons given that this was no longer in their procedures). However, he continued to work as