§ Mr. Ernie Rossasked the Secretary of State for Education and Science if his Department has sponsored or collected information on studies showing a possible link between high socio-economic class and high leukaemia mortality rates.
§ Mr. William SheltonThe Medical Research Council, which receives a grant-in-aid from my Department's science budget, has been running a number of large multicentre therapeutic trials since the late 1960s. These trials have been initiated and supervised by its leukaemia steering committee and serviced on a day-to-day basis by 247W the leukaemia trials office at the Royal Marsden hospital. I am advised that data collected in the course of these trials has indicated some very slight regional differences in leukaemia mortality rates, but that the question whether these differences are linked to socio-economic classes is a matter for further research and for analysis of data.