Australia's food and safety authority has sent out recommendations to women to include extra iodine supplements in their daily food routine when they are pregnant, and also while breastfeeding. Deficiency of iodine during pregnancy can negatively affect a baby's brain development and might also end up causing hearing problems.

Last year, the Food Standards Australia New Zealand said that all breads consist of a folic acid to prevent neural tube defects and all bakers were then required to use iodized salt.

Professor Creswell Eastman, an endocrinologist at the University of Sydney, has backed the authority’s latest advice and welcomed it. "I have been recommending for at least five years that we have a public health policy that all women pregnant women and breast feeding women are given this recommendation to take an extra 150 micrograms of iodine every day", he said.

President of the Australian Thyroid Foundation has stressed that it is "impossible" for pregnant and breast feeding women to get enough iodine from food alone, and therefore there should be enough supplements. "They'd have to eat a loaf of bread a day or they'd have to have an enormous amount of salt and nobody would recommend that a woman had an increase in salt", he said.