The number of cases of meningitis linked to an outbreak in Kent in England has risen to 29, up from 27 previously, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said, including both confirmed and suspected cases.
The agency said in a statement that, as of 12.30pm yesterday, it had been notified of 18 confirmed and 11 probable cases of meningitis linked to Kent.
Some 13 of the 18 confirmed cases are meningitis B. All cases have required hospital admission, it said.
It comes after one school pupil and one university student died from the infection and some young people have been placed in induced comas.
The chief scientific officer of UKHSA, Professor Robin May, said experts are still trying to work out if the meningitis bug has become more transmissible in the recent cases.
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.