SUMMARY Serum folate and vitamin B12 concentrations in early pregnancy were compared for 32 mothers with pregnancies affected by neural tube defects and 395 randomly selected pregnant control women from the same maternity hospitals. No significant differences were found between the affected mothers and the controls in the median values and frequency distributions of either vitamin. Sixteen of the samples from mothers whose infants had neural tube defects were taken between 9 and 13 weeks' gestation and 11 of these had both serum folate and vitamin B12 concentrations within the normal ranges for our laboratory. These findings are discussed in relation to the concept of folate deficiency as a major factor in the aetiology of neural tube defects.

No abstract

Acyclovir has been shown to be superior to IDU in the treatment of experimental corneal infections with HSV in the rabbit'5 and has also shown promise in treating dendritic ulceration in man. In patients treated with minimal wipe debridement Jones et al. '6 showed that topical treatment with acyclovir prevented early recurrences in comparison with placebo.

Although person-to-person transmission is likely to have caused a few of the cases, the results of our investigation suggest that the major contributing factor was exposure to certain batches of SD-treated factor VIII.