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?" Organisation for Rare Disorders executive director John Forman said.
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 yesterday said the Government's preference was to defer a decision on whether to proceed with the plan for three years.
The Cabinet would discuss the issue today.
The previous Labour-led Government agreed to the scheme because the New Zealand diet contained 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.
About 50 babies are born with such conditions 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 recording of aborted fetuses with the deformities was poor and thought to be at least three times the number of live births.
Folic acid fortification overseas had reduced the incidence of neural tube defects by up to 70%.
Mr Key's chief scientific adviser, Prof Peter Gluckman, last night agreed many neural tube defect cases were aborted or stillborn.
He dismissed any link between folic acid intake at the levels proposed and increased cancer rates and said both these points were irrelevant to the debate over mandatory fortification.
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.
The head of the University of Otago's department of human nutrition, Prof Murray Skeaff, said last week results of a review of randomised control trials on the issue, involving about 35,000 people, showed no significant change in the risk of cancer from taking folic acid.
Paediatrics genetics Prof Stephen Robertson has been critical of the addition being described as mass medication.
In a letter to the Otago Daily Times, published today, he said the move would be replacing a small dose of a vitamin, not a medicine, back into bread when it had been stripped out during the flour milling process.
Labour health spokeswoman, Ruth Dyson, said the deferral was a "cheap cop-out" in response to lobby group scaremongering.
