HL Deb 23 February 1998 vol 586 c75WA
The Countess of Mar

asked Her Majesty's Government:

In relation to their assertion on 30 October 1997 (WA 254) that the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (COT) "made their recommendations after considering the totality of the published literature on Vitamin B6 toxicity", whether that "totality" refers to the 106 papers named in the list placed in the Library of the House or to the 10,000 papers referred to by Professor Arnold Beckett in a recent letter to the Chairman of the COT; and, if the former, whether the COT consider the remaining 9,894 papers irrelevant. [HL566]

Baroness Jay of Paddington

The Secretariat of the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (COT) have not been provided with the search terms that Professor Beckett used and cannot directly verify his statement which indicated that "many address the issue of safety" and therefore presumably there are others that do not.

The searches carried out by the Secretariat identified those papers critical to the COT's assessment.