Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many grants of what value were made by his Department for meningitis research programmes in each of the last five years.

Since 2011, the Department’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) has made the following awards through its research programmes and fellowship schemes for research relating to meningitis:

- Impact of conjugate vaccination on population immunity to pneumococcal and meningococcal disease in England: immunosero-epidemiological analysis (£605,843; 2013-15); and

- Improving the diagnosis of meningitis in adults in the United Kingdom (£415,242; 2013-16).

In addition, the NIHR funds research relating to meningitis through:

- the NIHR Clinical Research Network;

- NIHR Biomedical Research Centres;

- NIHR Clinical Research Facilities for Experimental Medicine; and

- Health Protection Research Units.

Since 2011, the Department’s Policy Research Programme has made the following award for research relating to meningitis:

- Characterisation of meningococcal carriage isolates from UK MenCar4 study (£199,990; 2016-17).