Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress has been made in setting up a laboratory in the United Kingdom able to conduct blood folate status analysis.

The Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research are in the process of setting up the new method for serum folate in their laboratories in Cambridge, working closely with scientists at the Centre for Disease Control in the United States, who are the leading international experts on this analysis. Work is well advanced and it is hoped that the method will be ready to use to analyse blood samples collected in the National Diet and Nutrition Survey later this year.