Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate his Department has made of the proportion of babies who don't receive preventative medicine who then go on to develop group B streptococus if their mother is (a) a carrier and (b) not a carrier of that infection.

The UK National Screening Committee’s most recent evidence review estimated that in a population of 776,352 pregnant women, which includes those delivering at term and preterm, there would be approximately 163,000 carriers of group B streptococcus (GBS) at the point of delivery. If all carriers were untreated there would be about 450 cases of early onset GBS equivalent to 0.3% of babies born.

Information about the number of women receiving preventative treatment for GBS is not collected centrally.