SCORES of babies' lives are being needlessly lost every year, according to a consultant obstetrician.

Dr Shonag McKenzie told a regional summit on smoking and pregnancy that many babies' lives could be saved if women who smoked during pregnancy were treated as high-risk cases.

This is a particularly important issue in the North-East because more women smoke during pregnancy than any other region of England.

In some parts of the North, the proportion of women who smoke during pregnancy is twice the national average of 17 per cent.

Only women who have recognised medical complications are given ultraound scans at an early stage to determine whether the baby is growing properly.

Other women, including smokers, who are deemed to be low risk are only manually measured by a midwife and are not routinely given an early growth scan, which could pick up low-weight babies.

Dr McKenzie, who works at the Wansbeck Hospital, in Ashington, Northumberland, said the link between women who smoked during pregnancy -who tended to have smaller, sicklier babies -and stillbirths and miscarriages was so strong that smokers should be treated as high-risk cases.

She said: "The babies of mothers who smoke during pregnancy are 40 per cent more likely to be stillborn or die in the first four weeks of life."

Babies born to mothers who smoked are also much more likely to die because of cot death syndrome and have asthma later in life.

There is also an increased risk of malformation in the womb.

The consultant said she believed the problem was a shortage of resources, which meant there were not enough trained ultrasound scanning staff.

She said: "I should be seeing all of these women. I should be offering them growth scans.

"At the moment, we are not increasing the monitoring of these women until a problem develops.

"If I cannot detect the babies at risk, we are not going to bring down stillbirth rates.

"As a region, this is something we need to address."

Dr McKenzie also urged more health professionals to raise the issue of smoking during pregnancy with patients whenever they got the chance.

Gillian Murray, a stop smoking specialist who works with pregnant women in the region, told the conference that it was important to give more North-East health professionals training and the ability to refer patients to the smoking cessation serv-ice.

The event, at Wynyard Park was organised by the Fresh Smoke-Free North-East campaign group.