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Public Health (England)

I very much congratulate Slough on those efforts and I congratulate my hon. Friend on her championing of tackling health inequalities and dealing with some of these challenges so realistically. It is not easy. What I have been trying to do as public health Minister is to make the connections between strategies to tackle teenage pregnancy and strategies to tackle infant mortality. Statistics on infant mortality show that some 60 per cent. are related to teenage pregnancy, which is partly to do with issues about smoking in pregnancy, low-weight births and so forth. Again, we have to be smarter about connecting these different issues together in order to understand how best to tackle teenage pregnancy and, in doing so, how best to tackle infant mortality as well. On sexual health, we know that Chlamydia is a major reason for infertility, which is one of the reasons why the Department is funding Infertility Network UK to survey primary care trusts on access to in vitro fertilisation treatment and also to ask questions about Chlamydia screening. If we had more Chlamydia screening and greater awareness of the need for it—not tomorrow or next year, but down the road—we could make a difference to the numbers of people presenting with infertility problems as a result of contracting Chlamydia at an early age.