Doing what's best for baby - not milk formula companies

Health experts are unanimous in their verdict: breast milk is the best food to raise a healthy baby.

Yet in one of the world's best-educated and most wealthy cities, women still overwhelming use baby formula

While the World Health Organisation describes breastfeeding as "the normal way of providing young infants with the nutrients they need for healthy growth and development" and recommends feeding children exclusively on breast milk up to the age of six months, only 15 per cent of babies aged four to six months in Hong Kong are on this regime.

One reason is that, despite health professionals' advice, parents face a well-resourced baby milk industry that relentlessly promotes its product, implying that the best efforts of science are better for baby than nature's way.

Much of the advertising violates the International Code on Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes drawn up by the WHO and the UN children's organisation Unicef in 1981. But the government has done little to make brands toe the line, in part because of its reluctance to restrict a market in a city that prides itself on economic freedom.

But moves towards adopting a code to regulate milk formula advertising are finally progressing, not least since the revelation last year that several Japanese brands, available in Hong Kong on the unofficial, or grey, market, lack some essential nutrients.

After hundreds of babies fed on the Japanese formula had to be checked for iodine deficiency, the public - and some manufacturers - is coming around to the view that legal measures are needed to ensure milk formula standards.