Meningitis cases in UK outbreak rise to 29

A meningitis outbreak centered in Kent, England, has climbed to 29 cases—up from 27—according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), which said the total includes both confirmed and suspected infections.

In a statement, the agency said that as of 12.30pm yesterday it had been notified of 18 confirmed cases and 11 deemed probable, all linked to Kent.

Thirteen of the 18 confirmed infections are meningitis B. Every patient has required hospital admission, the agency added.

The surge follows the deaths of a school pupil and a university student, and several young people have been placed in induced comas.

He told Times Radio: “It’s certainly very unusual. So typically, we see on average in the UK about one case of meningitis a day. This is obviously a much bigger number than that and so there’s something unusual about this outbreak.

“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,” added Prof May.