Meningitis B latest: ‘Sporadic cases’ could spread outside Kent, health officials warn – UK Times

Experts are said to be considering expanding the eligibility for the routine meningitis B vaccine following a call for Wes Streeting.

The joint committee on vaccination and immunisation (JCVI) reportedly launched a review following the outbreak in Kent and are thinking about a wider review of eligibility for menB vaccinations, The Guardian reported.

The JCVI has previously said a catch-up campaign for young people who were born before 2015, when the jab was introduced for babies, would not be cost effective.

A mother’s campaign for the government to fund a meningitis B vaccination programme for all 16 to 23 year olds has received renewed momentum following the outbreak in Kent.

The petition, launched in October 2024, was created by Marrissa Mullans, whose son Alfie Jake Mullans was 18 when he died of menB in 2023.

Since Tuesday, the petition has gained around 13,000 signatures, bringing it up to more than 57,000.

In her petition calling for the programme, she wrote: “Meningitis stripped us of a bright future that should have been, ruthlessly snatching Alfie away at the tender age of eighteen.”

I am campaigning in Alfie’s memory so that fewer families have to endure this same pain.

“A MenB vaccine exists, but on the NHS it has only been routinely offered to babies born from September 2015. When the MenB programme was introduced, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommended routine infant vaccination but did not recommend an adolescent programme, saying it could not support that recommendation because of uncertainty over cost-effectiveness and the risk that it could displace more health benefit elsewhere in the NHS.”

She has also called for the government to run a national awareness campaign for parents and young people to understand that many teenagers and young adults are not protected against menB.

False claims that Keir Starmer said the UK may need to go into lockdown if meningitis cases escalate have spread widely across social media.

Posts shared hundreds of times claim the prime minister said: “The UK may need to go into lockdown as early as May if meningitis cases continue to escalate”.

Some posts also include an additional fake quote from the Starmer, in which he said: “I will do whatever it takes to keep the country safe over the election period, even if that means you can’t go outside”.

Number 10 confirmed to Full Fact that Starmer has not made these comments, with the claims appearing to have started from a satirical Facebook page.

The Independent’s health reporter Rebecca Whittaker reports:

Scientists say the meningitis strain is not a new variant and may not have mutated into an “invasive strain”.

Professor Brendan Wren, Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said: “The initial sequence data confirms that it is a single menB strain causing the current cluster of meningitis cases.

“The MenB ST-41/44 clonal complex has been previously identified in the UK and is not a new variant. This suggests that the strain has not mutated into a more invasive strain, but scrutiny of the full genome sequences and further studies will be required to confirm this.

“The current Bexsero MenB vaccine based on the cell surface antigens of MenB strains should provide protection against the MenB ST-41/44 variant.”

Two young people are dead and 20 are receiving treatment after a meningitis outbreak at the University of Kent. The students caught up in it belong to a generation that has never been routinely vaccinated against the strain responsible.

That is not because a vaccine doesn’t exist. It does. Bexsero, which protects against meningococcal group B disease (the strain responsible for the Kent outbreak) has been available since 2013. The UK even became the first country in the world to add it to its national immunisation schedule, in September 2015.

Every student at university today was born before July 2015, meaning every one of them missed the cut-off. The NHS never offered them the jab and no catch-up programme was ever provided. A decade of students has passed through higher education with no routine protection against the most common form of bacterial meningitis.

The decision not to extend the programme beyond infants reflects a genuine tension at the heart of vaccine policy. The government’s advisory body, the joint committee on vaccination and immunisation (JCVI) concluded that the benefit, real as it was, did not clear the economic threshold required to justify the cost.

Health chiefs have said experts are still trying to work out if the meningitis bug has become more transmissible in the recent cases.

The chief scientific officer of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Professor Robin May, told Times Radio the scale of the current outbreak os “very unusual”.

He said typically the UK sees about one case of meningitis a day on average in the UK.

“This is obviously a much bigger number than that and so there’s something unusual about this outbreak,” he continued. “We are focusing our investigations on two possibilities, which both may be true, or neither.

“So one is that there is something about the particular setting that has enabled this bacteria to spread very well in that particular club setting. We don’t know that, there’s no evidence for that at the moment, but that’s one course of investigation.

“The other possibility is that the bacteria itself has changed in a way that makes it more transmissible, perhaps more likely to cause disease. Many of us carry menB as a bacteria without any problems in the back of our throats all the time. So it could be that this is a bacteria that’s just more likely to progress to disease.

“We don’t know that – we’ve been working, as you can imagine, around the clock since the discovery of this outbreak to try and understand more about it, including doing DNA sequencing, genome sequencing for this strain and that is due back very, very soon. That analysis is extremely complex. The genome for this bacteria is about 100 times bigger than Covid so it’s a lot more complicated.

“So it will take us some time to analyse that, but we are very much focusing our attention on whether anything has changed in the bacteria that might make it more likely to spread or cause disease.”

Asked if such an outbreak could happen again, he said: “Well obviously that’s something we’re very conscious of.”

He said “we’ll be mindful both of the possibility of this particular strain, for example, re-emerging in the future, but also general principles that we’ll learn about the bacteria.

“As with all pathogens, there’s always much more we can learn, and by learning more about how they work, we hope to develop better ways to prevent them causing disease in the future.”

The chief scientific officer of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Professor Robin May, told Times Radio the focus was on the immediate response in Kent.

He added: “I would like to just stress, though, that is not a reason for people elsewhere in the country not to continue to be very alert to this.

“This is a very mobile population of students. Really important that if you’re not in the Kent area, but you see signs of this infection, you still seek medical help.

“Essentially, you’re looking for things like a sharp, high fever that comes on rapidly, a red rash that does not fade if you push a glass to it, aversion to bright light, stiff neck.

“And then symptoms that are kind of very flu-like symptoms, often kind of cold feet, clammy feeling, those kind of things.”

He said the “key message” is “don’t delay if you’re showing those kinds of symptoms.”

He added: “Don’t just go to bed and think ‘I’ll wake up tomorrow and see about it’, seek advice first.”

The Independent’s Health Reporter Rebecca Whittaker reports:

The number of cases of meningitis linked to the outbreak in Kent has risen from 27 to 29, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Thursday. Some 2,360 vaccinations and 9,840 doses of antibiotics have been given to those affected by the outbreak.

Health officials said samples have been taken from meningitis patients in hospitals to analyse the bacteria in a laboratory. Using genome sequencing, they hope to determine the specific variant of the meningitis B strain.

Professor Robin May, chief scientific officer at the UKHSA, explained it was unusual to see such a large number of cases from one single event.