§ Mrs. Knightasked the Secretary of State for Social Services whether research being carried out at Runwell Mental Hospital involves work on the brains of aborted foetuses.
§ Mr. MulleyI have been asked to reply.
The research is supported by the Medical Research Council and is concerned with the measurement of the effects 162W other countries in the apportionment of resources to preventive medicine.
§ Dr. OwenAs explained in the Government's recently published consultative document "Priorities for Health and Personal Social Services in England", preventive medicine forms an integral part of a wide range of services within the National Health Service. As such. it is not readily quantifiable in financial terms. It is not therefore possible to produce meaningful estimates of the total costs of preventive medicine, or to compare this type of expenditure either with the total National Health Service budget or with resources allocated to preventive medicine in other countries where for the most part preventive services are organised differently. A great deal of preventive work is also done outside the National Health Service by local authority education, environmental health and social service departments and voluntary bodies. No estimates are available of the cost incurred in such work.
Examples of expenditure in recent years on services which are wholly or mainly preventive are:
of age and disease on the human brain. The council informs me that it is based solely on routine pathological examination of post-mortem material and has never involved the use of foetal material.