The disease has been diagnosed in at least twenty people in the United Kingdom in the past week. Two people have now died from it. The patients had visited an entertainment venue in the city of Canterbury in early March.
Type B
An infection has also been confirmed in France. According to the ECDC, clusters of infections are often related to places where many people come together. After infection, patients can pass the disease on to others in their environment, but this does not happen at the speed of respiratory infections such as the coronavirus.
In Great Britain this concerns infections with meningococcal type B. These also occur in the Netherlands. In 2024, 121 people contracted this infection, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) reported.
Symptoms include colds, droopiness and a flu-like feeling. You can have the bacteria in your nose or throat, but it usually doesn’t make you sick. If it ends up in your bloodstream or nervous system, that is possible. You can then get meningitis or blood poisoning.
“We do not yet know exactly how the bacteria can enter the bloodstream,” Diederik van de Beek, neurologist at Amsterdam UMC, previously told RTL News. “It has to do with personal and bacterial factors, but we are still doing a lot of research into it.” The disease is dangerous for all ages. Meningitis caused by the meningococcal bacteria is especially dangerous for small children, teenagers and young adults up to 25 years of age.
Residual symptoms
“It is a disease that receives little attention, even though 10 percent of people who get it die from it,” says Van de Beek. “And half of the people who survive have residual symptoms that prevent them from living their lives as before the disease.”
Good to know: variants A, B, C, W and Y occur in the Netherlands. With the exception of meningococcal B, the National Vaccination Program provides vaccination against all variants. As a result, few people contract it anymore.
Three years ago, 21-year-old Luka was one of the few Dutch people who died from meningococcal type B. Her mother Ingeborg talks in this video about how this happened, despite the meningococcal vaccination that Luka had:
