Meningitis and the dangers of media contagion

Journalists are playing a dangerous role in the East Kent meningitis outbreak.

My hometown of Faversham, East Kent, is mourning the death of Juliette, a sixth-form pupil. This poor girl, along with a student at the University of Kent in Canterbury, died at the weekend from an outbreak of meningitis. At the time of writing, 11 others are understood to be seriously ill in hospital, including students from other local sixth forms. The outbreak is thought to have been connected to a popular local nightclub.

This is a tragedy for the young people and their families. Meningitis is a dangerous and contagious disease that is known to spread among clusters of young people, which is why students living in halls of residence are at particular risk. Until this current outbreak, incidences have been declining from a peak in the year 1999/2000, largely due to the introduction of the MenC vaccine. The particular cause of the current outbreak is not yet known; what is known is that teenagers and young adults are likely not to have had the vaccine to protect against MenB, which has been given to babies since 2015.

One lesson from this outbreak may well be that we should be offering MenB vaccinations to today’s teenagers and young adults, rather than limiting them to tomorrow’s. Another is that we should listen to the health authorities, who are familiar with meningitis and the measures that need to be taken in an outbreak: look out for symptoms, and treat close contacts of victims with antibiotics. That is why the University of Kent swiftly doled out antibiotics on campus, and everyone swiftly familiarised themselves with the symptoms of meningitis.

But another lesson that we should have learned already from the Covid pandemic is that turning a tragedy into a drama is insensitive and dangerous. And the behaviour of the UK media on 16 March shows that this lesson has been inverted.

As schools and universities have been trying to support students and parents in their grief and fear, local and national news outlets have inflamed the situation. The BBC has been running the Kent meningitis outbreak as its top story, second only to the Iran war, with continuous updates about the numbers of students queueing for antibiotics and saying they are too scared to go to lectures or seminars. In Faversham, a gaggle of journalists was camped outside the school gates: as though a teenager’s death just added background colour to their own breathless narrative.

The effect of all this has been to escalate an already febrile situation, putting pressure on schools and universities to override the UKHSA’s advice to carry on as normally as possible. Some schools and universities have reverted to online teaching and assessment while in others, staff and students are voting with their feet and deciding that being in a classroom, or even on a campus, is just too risky. So even when institutions manage to carry on ‘in person’, half the people aren’t there.

The form of this reaction is all too familiar, laid down by the response to the Covid-19 pandemic a few short years ago. There’s a sense among some that we know what to do now – cancel things quickly, put teaching online, and dig out the facemasks. But this routine adoption of the Covid playbook recycles all the wrong lessons from that bleak lockdown period.

First and foremost, it starts from the presumption that the best thing for students is that they are kept away from potential infection. But as we know from the lockdowns, when confronting a scary situation, and particularly when grieving for one of their peers, they need a sense of continuity and a place to be together. To send them back to their rooms to doomscroll and fret is uncaring and irresponsible. It’s unrealistic, in the current climate, to think that students will necessarily turn up for classes or that parents will necessarily send their kids to school, but we should be there for those who need and want to be.

Second, it moralises the social response to infectious disease in the most destructive way. It may sometimes make pragmatic sense to cancel an event or close a school for a limited time, but that is very different from the assumption that the only right and responsible thing to do is to close things down straightaway. Once in this loop, we find educational institutions accused, implicitly or explicitly, of putting lives at risk by trying to do exactly what the health authorities are advising them to do. And unless the UKHSA sends everyone back to their bedrooms, they too risk being suspected of having some callous agenda.

Third, it empowers the media and social media to spread panic and speculation in the name of ‘awareness’, with immediate impressions smugly presented as war reports from the front line. The media, which has neither roots in the communities on which it is reporting nor responsibility for running the educational institutions that are affected, has no limit on the degree of fear and uncertainty it can spread. In a few days’ time, the news cycle will have moved on but the parents, teachers and students won’t. Meanwhile social media provides a platform for anyone to have a go, from those who want to clobber schools and universities for putting their kids and the wider public in danger by carrying on, to those peddling conspiratorial ‘plandemic’ theories.

All this makes it very difficult for educational institutions to do what they need to do, as they have done over the decades: deal with an emergency situation as calmly and sensitively as they possibly can. Precisely because we worry about our kids, parents should be helping them to do that. Journalists should report on the facts about the outbreak, and leave schools, universities, and families alone.