§ Mr. FearnTo ask the Secretary of State for Health what research the Government are undertaking to discover how meningitis spreads.
§ Mr. FreemanThe Department of Health is funding a prospective case control study of meningococcal disease in eight west country health districts by Dr. Stanwell-Smith, Bristol and Western health authority. This study is looking at individual susceptibility to meningococcal disease.
The main agency through which the Government support medical research is the Medical Research Council (MRC), which receives its grant in aid from the Department of Education and Science. The MRC supports work into the epidemiology of meningitis at Oxford (Professor R. Moxon), and into the immunobiology of meningococcal infection at the MRC clinical research centre (Dr. Taylor-Robinson): the latter studies could, in the longer term, provide information on the spread of the disease.