The UK Health Security Agency named Reading Blue Coat school and Highdown secondary school and sixth form centre on Thursday as schools attended by pupils receiving treatment for meningitis, after confirming that a student who attended Henley college in Oxfordshire had died from the infection.
Close contacts of the patients have been offered antibiotics as a precaution, while health officials said the strain of meningitis B identified in Berkshire is different from the one that spread in Kent earlier this year. The agency did not name the student, but the death has turned a local outbreak into a wider source of alarm across school and college-age communities in the area.
Dr Rachel Mearkle said the agency understood that many people would be affected by the sad news and offered condolences to the student’s friends and family. She said students and staff would naturally be worried about the risk of further cases, but meningococcal meningitis needs very close contact to spread and large outbreaks such as the one seen in Kent are rare. She added that the agency was working with partners and had provided public health advice and precautionary antibiotic treatment to close contacts, and that the risk to the wider public remains low.
The case has landed against the backdrop of a meningitis B outbreak in Berkshire affecting school and college-age people, a group that sits squarely in the age range most commonly hit by meningococcal disease. England records between 300 and 400 cases of meningococcal disease each year, and the illness is most common in babies, young children, teenagers and young adults. The menB vaccine has been offered routinely to babies in the NHS childhood vaccination programme since 2015, but it is not a blanket shield against every cluster that appears among older children and students.
That is the tension in Berkshire: the disease is hard to spread, yet when it reaches a tight social circle it can move fast enough to force urgent tracing and preventive treatment. Andrew Preston said the latest outbreak had again emerged in the college-age cohort, as the Kent outbreak did, and that current cases appeared contained to a well-defined social contact group. He said that allows rapid contact tracing and the administration of antibiotics and vaccination if needed, while at present there is no sign of transmission to the wider community, even as concern in the area remains high.
Henley college said its thoughts and sincere condolences were with the student’s family and friends at what it called an extremely difficult time. The college said it was supporting those affected within its community and following the advice and guidance given by the UK Health Security Agency, while declining to provide further detail out of respect for the family. For Berkshire families watching the case unfold, the next question is not whether the disease can be frightening — it already has been — but whether the combination of rapid tracing, precautionary antibiotics and a vaccine long built into the childhood programme is enough to stop this cluster from widening further.
