Suspension of folic acid scheme deplored

The suspension of a plan to force the addition of folic acid to bread will result in the continued abortion and natural death of scores of babies with preventable deformities, a health campaigner says.

"Who is going to take responsibility for a couple of classrooms of kids that are not going to be there - every year?" said John Forman, executive director of the Organisation for Rare Disorders.

Under a new transtasman food standard, bakers were to be required to add folic acid to most bread from September, but Prime Minister John Key said yesterday that the Government's preference was to defer a decision on whether to proceed with the rule for three years.

The Cabinet would discuss the issue today.

The previous Labour-led Government agreed to the scheme because the New Zealand diet contains too little folate, the natural form of the food supplement folic acid. A sufficient intake reduces the risk of babies being born with neural tube defects, which range from spina bifida to the complete absence of the brain.

Around 50 babies are born with this condition each year.

Mr Forman said this number was expected to reduce by four to 14 cases through the mandatory fortification of bread. But this would also have reduced the number of abortions of fetuses that had neural tube defects.

He said there were 63 live births and aborted fetuses with neural tube defects in 2003, but the recording of aborted fetuses with the deformities was poor and was thought to be at least three times the number of live births.

Folic acid fortification overseas had been shown to reduce the incidence of neural tube defects by up to 70 per cent.

Mr Key's chief scientific adviser, Professor Peter Gluckman, last night agreed that many cases of neural tube defects were aborted or stillborn.

And he dismissed any link between folic acid intake at the levels proposed and increased rates of cancer.

But he said both these points were irrelevant to the current debate over the mandatory fortification policy. The issue was the poor communication of the science behind the move.

"Until the science has been properly communicated, we can't interfere in the food supply. Other interests have got into the game - the food industry and all sorts of other aspects - and there's been a fair bit of cherry picking in this by advocates on both sides of the science."

Food Safety Minister Kate Wilkinson has been lobbied by bakers opposed to mandatory fortification and has declared herself "not a fan" of the policy.

Last week she reached an agreement with her Australian counterpart, Mark Butler, that exempted New Zealand from the transtasman standard.

Mr Key said yesterday on TV One's Q&A programme: "The Government's clearly stated preferred option is that there is a deferral to the mandatory inclusion of folic acid in bread. That deferral would take place until May 2012, and we could then use that time to fully assess the merits or otherwise of the debate."

The Cabinet would consider releasing a discussion document.

Lyall Thurston, from the group Parents of Children with Spina Bifida, said commercial interests had prevailed over public health, and women might now be afraid to take folic acid supplements.

Labour's health spokeswoman, Ruth Dyson, said the deferral was a "cheap cop-out" in response to lobby-group scaremongering.