The Iodine Blog - August 2020

Protecting progress in the time of COVID-19

IGN and its partners believe in a world where people have access to nutritious food, including the iodine in their diet that allows children to reach their full cognitive potential. The profound health and economic impacts of COVID-19 will make that vision more difficult to attain, but even more important to achieve. IGN and its partners are working to protect the progress we’ve made in ensuring that salt is iodized to prevent iodine deficiency disorders, and to find a way forward from here.

There are a lot of things to think about: assuring procurement and supply of iodine to fortify salt; mitigating rising prices caused by stops or slowdowns in production; ensuring that the salt that countries are importing is adequately iodized, and positioning iodized salt production as an essential economic and public health activity. Over the next few months, this blog will share examples of how countries and stakeholders are doing just that.

Global improvements in iodine status over the past 25 years have resulted in major health and economic benefits in low- and middle-income countries. As we rebuild our food systems and plan to advance global nutrition, let’s make sure we protect and expand on these key interventions that can improve the quality of people’s diets through access to safe, affordable nutritious fortified foods. They are more necessary than ever.

The IGN Team