The premature death of two young people from meningitis after an outbreak of the disease in Kent is a tragedy. Susan Hopkins, the CEO of the UK Health Service Agency has called the speed at which this particular infection is spreading ‘unprecedented’. But thanks to the concerted efforts of successive British governments, tragedies related to this disease are becoming rarer and rarer. Since 1998, the number of deaths in England caused by invasive meningococcal disease in the UK has fallen by around 86 per cent.
That long-term progress is important context for what is happening in Canterbury and London. The outbreak, linked to the University of Kent, has so far involved 20 suspected cases of MenB, a strain of meningitis. UK Health Service Agency teams are now tracing contacts and distributing precautionary antibiotics to students and others who may have been exposed.
Because of how deadly the illness is (bacterial meningitis has an average case fatality rate of around one in ten), and the other health complications it can cause, we should not underplay the seriousness of the outbreak.
Nonetheless, as the chart shows, at the time, meningitis was once a far more common and feared disease, particularly among teenagers and young adults. Outbreaks at universities and schools were a semi-regular occurrence in the 1990s, with clusters occurring in Cardiff University, Southampton University and a school in Gloucestershire. The decline is the result of a remarkable public-health success story that began in the late 1990s.
In 1999, the UK became the first country in the world to introduce a nationwide vaccination programme against MenC (a different strain), publicly funded, combined with a massive catch-up campaign targeting all under-18s. Within a few years cases of MenC collapsed and deaths fell, establishing a model that other countries would later follow.
The progress did not stop there. In the early 2010s, after surveillance detected the emergence of new strains the UK again moved ahead of most countries. Vaccination programmes were expanded for teenagers and young adults to suppress transmission, and in 2015 Britain became the first country to introduce a nationwide publicly funded vaccine against MenB for infants. These decisions, taken across successive governments, helped drive the long-term collapse in deaths that the chart above shows.
Some press coverage since the incident began has pointed to a dip in teenage meningitis vaccination rates after the pandemic as a possible population-wide vulnerability. While teenage vaccination levels did fall after the pandemic, we are already starting to see a rough trend back in the other direction with MenACWY (a vaccine which protects against four groups of the disease) coverage for both year 9 and 10 improving moderately in the last year.
None of this diminishes the seriousness of what has happened in Kent, but while it is a frightening disease we must remember how much rarer it has become. A disease that, within living memory, killed hundreds of people in Britain every year now claims only a small fraction of that number.
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