\n<\/p>\n
Tyra Skinner had already been violently sick three times when doctors at Kent\u2019s William Harvey hospital realised something was badly wrong. The 20-year-old was rushed into critical care, racked with a pounding headache, a stiff neck and excruciating pain \u2013 the hallmark symptoms of meningitis, the disease that had already claimed two young lives in Kent.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe could hardly move, she was in a foetal position. She was so cramped up and sore,\u201d her father, Dale Skinner, 42, told the Guardian. \u201cIt was horrendous, to be honest, to see her so helpless and in so much pain.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Canterbury Christ Church University student was quickly given antibiotics and fluids before tests confirmed her family\u2019s worst fears: she had meningitis. Her condition has since improved, but she is expected to remain in hospital for at least another week.<\/p>\n
Ten days before her admission on Monday, Skinner had been at Club Chemistry, the nightclub in Canterbury that health officials believe was at the centre of a \u201csuper-spreader\u201d event.<\/p>\n
Experts are still trying to understand how a cluster of infections linked to the nightclub escalated into a public health incident requiring a national response, with a case now reported in London.<\/p>\n
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Friday there had been 29 confirmed or suspected cases of meningitis. Of the 18 confirmed cases, 13 are known to be caused by the meningitis B strain. All 29 have required hospital admission. More than 9,800 courses of antibiotics and 2,360 vaccines have been administered to eligible people in Kent.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Anyone who attended Club Chemistry from 5 March onwards would be vaccinated, the health secretary said.<\/span> Photograph: Carlos Jasso\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Prof Dr Anjan Ghosh, the director of public health at Kent county council, said: \u201cAs more cases are getting known, they all have a back history back to [Club Chemistry].\u201d Known patients visited the venue on 5, 6 or 7 March, during which an estimated 4,800 people are thought to have attended.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat probably happened in the club is you had loads of people in close contact, probably sharing vapes, sharing drinks. It\u2019s a club setting, so probably there was intimacy. So all those things combined to contribute to the spread of this bacteria,\u201d said Ghosh.<\/p>\n <\/span>Prof Dr Anjan Ghosh.<\/span> Photograph: Gareth Fuller\/PA Media<\/p>\n For Chelsea Abbott, a 19-year-old college student from Herne Bay who visited the club on 5 and 12 March, that rang true.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone\u2019s just kissing each other, or you go to the smoking area and someone\u2019s like, \u2018have you got a vape?\u2019 because their vape died and then you share it,\u201d she said. \u201cOnce you\u2019re drunk, you\u2019ll share your vape with this person, that person, and like 10 people have had your vape.<\/p>\n \u201cOr someone\u2019s like: \u2018Let me get a sip of your drink.\u2019 Then you look over and someone\u2019s making out with someone, and then they\u2019re making out with someone else. So it\u2019s definitely a very easy place for bacteria to spread, which is probably why it spread so much in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n By Sunday 15 March, Juliette Kenny, an 18-year-old sixth-form pupil at Queen Elizabeth\u2019s grammar school in Faversham, had died, as had an unnamed student from the University of Kent.<\/p>\n <\/span>People queue for the MenB vaccine at the University of Kent campus in Canterbury.<\/span> Photograph: Carl Court\/Getty Images<\/p>\n The UKHSA said it was notified about the first case on Friday 13 March and began tracing contacts and offering antibiotics \u201cas a matter of urgency\u201d. Only two days later at 6pm did it issue a public health alert. The agency also contacted Louise Jones-Roberts, the owner of Club Chemistry, via the club\u2019s Instagram account, warning that a case had been confirmed among her recent customers.<\/p>\n Jones-Roberts said she was initially dumbfounded. \u201cWe all have an understanding of how things like flu and coronavirus are transmitted because we were beaten around the head with it during Covid, but this is different,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m a parent and [meningitis] is the thing that everyone is terrified of. I said, look, we\u2019ve just got to tell people now what the symptoms are and what to do if they\u2019ve got them.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, unaware of the outbreak, many students who did not have exams in the final week of term had travelled to their homes across the country for Mother\u2019s Day. Others, such as the University of Kent law student Kishan Mistri, remained on campus.<\/p>\n The 20-year-old first became aware of the infections via a story on the BBC at about 7.30pm on Sunday. Earlier in the afternoon, he had noticed ambulances and fire engines outside Hut 8, a fast-food outlet on campus near student accommodation. Panicked and confused, he messaged friends, before his social media feeds and group chats filled with videos of emergency responders in hazmat suits and horrifying footage of a sick student.<\/p>\n \u201cThe poor boy looked terribly ill getting wheeled out of [student] accommodation. It was absolutely heartbreaking. He looked super ill. I have never seen anyone look that ill before,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThe tensions in our flat and how people felt, it was something that I\u2019ve never felt since Covid. It was scarier.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>A student receives the MenB vaccine at the University of Kent sports hall.<\/span> Photograph: Dan Kitwood\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Students revising for exams in the library quickly began packing up their things as the news of the outbreak started making headlines.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s exam season. Everyone was everywhere,\u201d said Praise, a student of medicine. \u201cThen we start getting sent things from people. It\u2019s a screenshot of BBC News, saying that two people passed away. Then we\u2019re seeing one by one people just leave [the library]. It was empty. You can literally walk and hear a pin drop. That\u2019s how quiet it was.\u201d<\/p>\n At 11pm that night, an email told Mistri and some other students that the exams they were due to sit the following day had been postponed.<\/p>\n Mistri and other students who spoke to the Guardian described the University of Kent\u2019s initial response as slow and inadequate. Lilia Thomson-Amato, a marketing student, who had travelled home to Thanet, 15 miles from Canterbury, for Mother\u2019s Day, said she did not get an email from the university about the outbreak until 9.30pm on Sunday. It included a message from the UKHSA and warned: \u201cIf you think you may have symptoms, please get medical advice urgently.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a real disappointment from the university, how they initially handled things,\u201d said Thomson-Amato. \u201cI didn\u2019t feel their approach was completely appropriate for the scale of what was actually going on, considering one of their students had died.\u201d<\/p>\n One university staff member also criticised the slow response, saying she was not informed until 8.30pm on Sunday. She said workers were only offered the vaccine on Thursday \u2013 four days after the outbreak was made public. \u201cIt was imperative that on campus students were prioritised,\u201d she said, and while she felt grateful for the support now being offered to staff, \u201cit\u2019s also frustrating that it feels like an afterthought\u201d.<\/p>\n Many students fled the university amid the panic and confusion, with some getting coaches at 4am on Monday and one booking a last-minute flight back to the Bahamas.<\/p>\n \u201c[The university] is like a ghost town now. It\u2019s very quiet where all the students have gone home,\u201d the staff member said earlier this week. \u201cI\u2019ve seen photographs of paramedics going into [campus buildings] in hazmat suits. It\u2019s disconcerting \u2026 There are staff buildings [and] catering outlets quite close to those. It\u2019s put me off going up to campus, I\u2019ll say that.\u201d<\/p>\n A University of Kent spokesperson said: \u201cThis is a regional public health matter and not specific to the university, so the response is being led by the UK Health Security Agency. We contacted our staff and students as soon as guidance from UKHSA allowed, and are continuing to do so while the situation unfolds.\u201d<\/p>\n On Wednesday afternoon, students returned to campus in face masks and queued for the MenB vaccine. Among them was Katie Moore, an 18-year-old studying law with criminology, who also received a course of antibiotics after realising she might have been exposed to the infection at Club Chemistry on 7 March.<\/p>\n She said one of her friends, a Canterbury Christ Church student, was taken into intensive care on Monday with meningitis. \u201cShe\u2019s still in the hospital now. She was in her uni accommodation, rang her mum, said: \u2018I really don\u2019t feel well,\u2019 and ended up being taken in an ambulance into hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Wes Streeting said more people would be vaccinated.<\/span> Photograph: Dan Kitwood\/Getty Images<\/p>\n On a visit to the University of Kent on Thursday, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, said more people affected by the meningitis outbreak would be vaccinated, including students who had travelled home and anyone who attended Club Chemistry from 5 March onwards, alongside sixth-formers at four schools and other university students in Canterbury.<\/p>\n Ghosh pointed out that meningitis has an incubation periods of two to 10 days, meaning anyone who was infected at the club should have been showing symptoms by Tuesday 17 March.<\/p>\n \u201cIn theory, from now on, if there are new cases emerging, there is a possibility they are from secondary transmission,\u201d he said. Such an outcome would suggest that meningitis was now spreading in the community.<\/p>\n However, the future remains uncertain. \u201cBecause we don\u2019t know in the next few days or weeks whether there\u2019s onward transmission that\u2019s happening or not,\u201d he said. But he also offered reassurance to those grappling with anxiety. \u201cThe memories of Covid have not gone, and that was quite traumatic for a lot of people. But this is definitely not Covid \u2013 it\u2019s not like a rampant, marauding virus that\u2019s spreading around.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tyra Skinner had already been violently sick three times when doctors at Kent\u2019s William Harvey hospital realised something was badly wrong. The 20-year-old was rushed into critical care, racked with a pounding headache, a stiff neck and excruciating pain \u2013 the hallmark symptoms of meningitis, the disease that had already claimed two young lives in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47240,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[5333,3735,859,920,23933,18004,153,1527,9062,2328],"class_list":{"0":"post-47239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-covid","9":"tag-felt","10":"tag-ive","11":"tag-kent","12":"tag-kents","13":"tag-meningitis","14":"tag-outbreak","15":"tag-pain","16":"tag-scarier","17":"tag-shock"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}