Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many diagnoses have been made or confirmed by the Rare and Imported Pathogens Laboratory in each of the last five years.

The diagnoses made by the Rare and Imported Pathogen Laboratory (RIPL) are made of up of definite positive tests that indicate the primary acute disease a patient has, and also the exclusion of diseases that allow clinicians to look for other causes locally. All samples, other than those sent specifically for Lyme disease and leptospirosis, will have from six to ten tests performed on them depending on the clinical problem. It is therefore only possible to report the number of samples tested as below:

Number of samples tested annually by RIPL