Page 2601 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 1994
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MR CONNOLLY: I thank Mr Stevenson for his question because it does raise a very responsible public health issue. That column by Dr Bates in this month's Canberra Doctor arose from a conference I opened and Dr Bates attended, held at Woden Valley Hospital some weeks ago. The particular quotes come from a paper presented by Professor Short of Monash University, who is one of Australia's leading experts on this issue. He made the quite stunning claim - very supportable on the evidence, and supported also by documents from the World Health Organisation - that if we could get all of those women who could breastfeed to breastfeed we could have a public health impact that would be comparable to getting everybody who could stop smoking to stop smoking. Certainly, evidence is mounting that not only is there a massive health benefit for young infants in terms of gut diseases and general rates of immunity to diseases, but also there is a now demonstrable impact on breast cancer rates in women who have breastfed.
I was very pleased to host that conference, and I should also give the Canberra Times a pat on the head. Professor Short, in delivering that paper, expressed some frustration that he had presented it to a number of forums around Australia but had never been able to get any interest in what he was saying. It seemed to me that it was a very important message, and my media adviser went out to the Canberra Times with the paper. He gave the duty editor a copy of Professor Short's paper, which made the front-page feature story in the following day's Canberra Times, on the Sunday. So I am pleased that the Canberra Times was the first newspaper in Australia to run that very important public health message.
I cannot tell you the precise rates of breastfeeding; it is not something we keep statistics on. What can we do to encourage breastfeeding? This Assembly almost unanimously passed the Discrimination Act a few years ago. One of the grounds of discrimination is status as a carer. There is a ground for discrimination action against any restaurant or other people who take exception to a woman breastfeeding. Professor Short was calling on hospitals - and I am proud that the ACT hospital system has taken this approach for some years - not to distribute free samples of formula in the maternity wings of hospitals, because that can encourage the wrong message. I am proud that ACT Health does not do that. I am not sure when that occurred; but I assume that it was during Mr Berry's stewardship. Again, that is a very important message.
Staff in the ACT maternity hospitals are very enthusiastic promoters of the breastfeeding message, as anyone who has had association with the system in recent years would know. I was very pleased that something like 100 of our nurses and midwives took a Saturday off and attended this major seminar at Woden Valley Hospital to increase their knowledge and awareness of breastfeeding. So the message is strongly sent out both in the hospital and at the baby health clinics around Canberra, where again young mothers are encouraged to breastfeed and given the warnings about not breastfeeding.
One suggestion Professor Short made, and it is one that I think is worth exploring, is that we should look at requiring manufacturers of formula to, in effect, put a health warning comparable to the tobacco health warnings on their packaging. At the moment, they do usually have a message like "Breast is best", and we would encourage mothers to
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