Mr. Tim Collins:

It is a good point. We need to focus on the low-hanging fruit. The biggest modifiable risk for cardiovascular disease is probably high blood pressure or hypertension. Ireland is a complete outlier in this regard in Europe. The Irish LongituDinal Study on Ageing, TILDA, data for the over-50s indicates that approximately 64% of those aged over 50 have hypertension and approximately half of those have undiagnosed hypertension, so there are many people with high blood pressure, which can cause stroke, heart disease, kidney disease and, ultimately, dementia. They will remain undiagnosed until they have a blood pressure check. The other difficulty in Ireland is that among those who know they have high blood pressure, fewer than half have their condition properly controlled. That is one of the reasons we have promoted the idea of a national hypertension awareness campaign to let people know this is a relatively symptomless condition that can have a major bearing on their health in terms of chronic disease and acute incidents such as stroke. Until we start putting resources into screening for such conditions, we will continue to have the same level of death and disability, with approximately 9,000 lives lost each year from cardiovascular disease. It is an important issue.