A student who attended Henley college in Oxfordshire has died from meningitis B, and health officials on Thursday named two Berkshire schools where pupils are receiving treatment as they moved to contain the outbreak.
The UK Health Security Agency said Reading Blue Coat school and Highdown secondary school and sixth form centre were among the places attended by pupils now being treated. Close contacts of the patients were offered antibiotics as a precaution, while the agency said the risk to the wider public remains low. Dr Rachel Mearkle said many people would be affected by the news and offered condolences to the student’s friends and family.
The outbreak is in Berkshire, but it is part of a wider pattern that has alarmed health officials before. In March, a major outbreak in Kent killed two people and left more than a dozen needing hospital treatment. That earlier episode had been linked to meningococcal disease spreading through a college-age group, and it sharpened concern about how quickly these infections can move when people are in very close contact.
Mearkle said students and staff would naturally be worried about further cases, but that meningococcal meningitis requires very close contact to spread and that large outbreaks such as the one seen in Kent are rare. She said public health teams were working with partners and had already given advice and precautionary antibiotics to close contacts. Meningococcal disease does not spread easily, she said, and the wider public risk remains low.
Officials also said the strain of meningitis B identified in Berkshire is different from the one behind the Kent outbreak. Andrew Preston said this latest outbreak had again emerged in the college-age cohort, like the Kent episode, but that current cases appeared contained to a well-defined social contact group. That, he said, allows rapid contact tracing and the administration of antibiotics and vaccination if needed as a precaution.
The statistics underline why the situation is being watched so closely. Between 300 and 400 cases of meningococcal disease are diagnosed in England every year, but the infection can still prove fatal and can move fast once it reaches a close-knit group. The menB vaccine has been offered routinely to babies as part of the NHS childhood vaccination programme since 2015, yet the current cases show that older teenagers and young adults can still be affected.
Henley college said it was supporting those affected within its community and following guidance from the UK Health Security Agency. “Out of respect for the family, we will not be providing further detail at this time,” the college said. The timing of the warning matters because the named schools and the college-age setting put families, staff and students on alert now, while health teams work to keep the outbreak from widening beyond the close-contact groups already identified.
For Berkshire, the answer to the immediate question is clear: officials do not see evidence that the disease is spreading widely, but they are moving quickly because one death and multiple treatment cases are enough to make speed matter.
