Wes Streeting has defended the response to an “unprecedented” meningitis outbreak that has left two people dead as health officials ramp up vaccinations to contain the spread of the infection.
The health secretary said he was confident the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) had acted “as quickly and as comprehensively as possible” after it was criticised for not acting quickly enough to alert the public.
On Tuesday morning, the number of confirmed cases in the outbreak had risen from 13 to 15, as officials confirmed it was fuelled by the meningitis B strain of the virus, likely to have been passed on at a “super-spreader” event. All patients are in hospital, and infections have now been linked to the University of Kent and at least four schools, with a case at a fifth school under investigation.
A targeted vaccination drive for students at the University of Kent has been urgently rolled out, while 700 doses of antibiotics have been distributed to help prevent further spread.
Health chiefs say they have never seen such a rapid spread of cases of meningitis, blaming a “super-spreader” event for the surge in numbers.
Susan Hopkins, chief executive of the the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), said in 35 years it was the highest number of cases she had seen in one weekend with this type of infection.
“This looks like a super-spreader event, with ongoing spread within the halls of residence in the universities,” she said. “There will have been some parties particularly around this, so there will have been lots of social mixing.
“It's the explosive nature that is unprecedented here.”
And England’s deputy chief medical officer Dr Thomas Waite said: “This is by far the quickest-growing outbreak I’ve ever seen in my career.”
Five schools in Kent have had meningitis cases, and one patient who travelled to London is now in hospital there, the Department for Health and Social Care confirmed to The Independent.
Officials say all the cases were linked to Club Chemistry nightclub in Canterbury and the University of Kent.
Revealing a timeline of the outbreak, which has claimed the lives of an 18-year-old school pupil, Juliette, and an unnamed 21-year-old university student, Mr Streeting said the UKHSA was informed of the first case on Friday and traced that person’s close contacts, offering prophylactic antibiotics “as a matter of urgency”.
He said on Saturday, French health authorities alerted the UKHSA to a second case, in France, of a person who had attended the University of Kent. At the time, both lived in private accommodation, and the link between the two is unknown.
However, on Saturday, further people with meningitis symptoms were identified at local hospitals by 7pm, but the public health alert was not issued until 6pm on Sunday.
Mr Streeting said: “This is an unprecedented outbreak. It is also a rapidly developing situation.”
“It is important that the House [of Commons] and wider public understand, even before the public health alert was issued, students and young people who had been in close contact were being offered antibiotics. This is precisely what you would expect in a rapid response, and I am confident UKHSA acted as quickly and as comprehensively as possible.”
The UKHSA has announced a targeted vaccination programme for students living at Canterbury halls of residence, but a surge in demand for those seeking private vaccines has left some pharmacies in Kent running out of supplies, Dr Leyla Hannbeck, CEO of the Independent Pharmacies Association, said.
There were also online reports of pharmacies allegedly price-gouging on vaccines and offering them for “several hundred pounds”. But Mr Streeting said health authorities did not advise people to buy vaccines privately and said it was “immoral” for companies to profiteer in this situation.
The MenB vaccine has been available on the NHS since 2015 as part of routine childhood immunisations given to babies, but that means many school children and university students are not vaccinated.
Mr Streeting has asked the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) to “re-examine eligibility for meningitis vaccines” for a wider group of people after it previously ruled a MenB catch-up campaign for older children was not cost-effective.
Although a targeted vaccine rollout is recommended in this instance, epidemiologists have said the MenB vaccine is too expensive and doesn’t stop transmission.
“It is an expensive vaccine, and there are better things to spend the NHS budget on,” Keith Neal, professor in the epidemiology of infectious diseases at the University of Nottingham, told The Independent.
He said: “The vaccine does not cover all group B strains. Unlike the ACWY vaccine, which stops people carrying the bacteria, the B vaccine does not prevent carriage.”
While the full scale of the outbreak is not yet known, with some cases still under investigation, one vaccine expert said it was unlikely to spread across the country because the rollout of antibiotics would “kill the bug in [people’s] noses and throats, and so it stops them getting sick and stops them infecting other people”.
Prof Adam Finn, a former member of the JCVI, told The Independent: “As long as people get them [antibiotics], it [the outbreak] will snuff out. There’s a bit of a Covid-19-style panic going on; however, it's not going to go shooting around the country… There might be more cases, and there might be cases elsewhere where people have gone home or moved, but it's not going to turn out to be an explosive thing.”
Ian Jones, professor of virology at Reading University, told The Independent: “I don’t think the worry can be avoided, but it is not the pattern for meningitis outbreaks. They are time and place situations that are treated and then return to baseline levels. So, it’s unlikely to spread, but we need to reinforce the symptoms advice until this has passed.”
However, experts have also highlighted that not enough is known about the type of meningitis B that has been identified and whether “there are some mutations” causing more severe illness.
Dr Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, said: “It’s a tricky pathogen to handle because there are so many different types, and there may be something about this specific serotype in this outbreak that is causing it to behave differently, which is why we’re seeing so many severe cases.”
Health officials said genome sequencing to determine the specific variant of the MenB strain was being carried out.
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