An infectious diseases expert tonight called for public health officials to reconsider a meningitis B vaccination drive for adolescents.
Professor Paul Hunter, a member of the Emergency Preparedness and Response unit at the National Institute for Health Research, says the Canterbury outbreak should prompt an urgent review.
He told The Mail on Sunday: ‘It will be driven by whether this outbreak is a one-off or whether this is an indication of things to come.’
It came as the number of confirmed and suspected cases linked to the Kent outbreak rose to 34 after five more were identified.
Two youngsters have died, and there were fears students returning home for the Easter holidays could spread the disease, with sporadic household cases outside the epicentre.
Officials said secondary cases could involve people who were not infected at Club Chemistry in Canterbury, thought to be the origin of the outbreak, but caught it from someone who was there.
Health chiefs said these should be easy to contain – and believed the outbreak was peaking.
Hundreds of students at the University of Kent again joined queues today to be vaccinated.
More than 12,000 doses of the meningitis B vaccination have been delivered to people in Kent by this morning
People, mainly students, queued this weekend to receive meningitis B vaccinations at a sports centre on the University of Kent campus
More immediate protection against an outbreak is provided by antibiotics, and health chiefs say the rollout is going well, with more than 12,000 doses delivered by this morning.
Professor Hunter, from the University of East Anglia’s Norwich School of Medicine, said: ‘As soon as an outbreak is suspected, the critically important thing is to start identifying contacts, offering them antibiotics and giving advice on what to do if they become unwell.’
Juliette Kenny, an 18-year-old sixth-form student at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Faversham, and an unnamed student, 21, at the University of Kent, have died since the outbreak.
Juliette’s father Michael said ‘no family should experience this pain and tragedy’ and called for better protections to be in place for young people against meningitis B.
This included urging the Government to improve access to the MenB vaccination for young people.
The jab was introduced on the NHS for babies in 2015, meaning most young people born before then are not protected unless they have had it privately.
Today’s queues included students who had left the city to go home for the Easter holiday but had returned to receive the medicines.
A spokeswoman for the UK Health Security Agency said last night there were ‘no supply issues’ regarding vaccines or antibiotics.
She added: ‘There are sufficient antibiotic stocks at the university, in local hospitals, and with the ambulance service.’
