Folic Acid

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I think my noble friend alludes to the rollout of the vaccine, which has been the consummate preventive medicine programme that the country has ever seen. It is, I hope, an inflection point in the whole country’s approach to its healthcare. We have for too long emphasised late-stage, heavy- duty interventions, and we have not focused enough on preventive early-stage interventions. Folic acid is a really good example, as are the vaccine and fluoridation, and the kinds of population health measures we hope to bring in will address all of those.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB) [V]]

I too commend the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for his tenacity on this important aspect. Do the Government recognise that 90% of women of childbearing age have low folate levels? If these were corrected by the dietary addition of folate to flour, we could see up to a 58% decrease in neural tube defects. These are massive numbers and cannot be ignored. The clock is still ticking and there are women getting pregnant today who have low folate levels.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Baroness’s figures are not quite the same as the ones I have in front of me. The mandatory fortification of bread flour with folic acid in Australia resulted in a 14.4% overall decrease in NTDs—although that is still a really important number, and if we are running at 1,000 a year in the UK, 50% of which are due to unplanned pregnancies, there are clearly important grounds for this measure to be considered seriously.