Published 18 March 2026, The Telegraph website: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/18/france-delay-britain-kent-meningitis-case-48-hours-ukhsa/

Joint byline with Laura Donnelly (Health Editor) and Michael Searles (Deputy Health Editor).

The deadly delays in tackling meningitis outbreak

Officials are facing questions over hold up in rolling out full scale response to ‘cluster’ at Kent University

When meningitis strikes, a quick response is the difference between life and death.Those at risk of infection do not only have to be alerted, health officials tasked with managing outbreaks need to know as much as they can, as soon as they can.

However, successive delays by the NHS and health authorities in the UK and France meant a “full scale” response to the latest outbreak was slow off the mark.AdvertisementIt took an NHS trust a whole day to notify health officials that a patient with suspected meningitis had died, The Telegraph can reveal.

And by the time they did, the outbreak had killed a second patient at the same trust. More people were also being admitted requiring emergency care.The French health ministry has also revealed it was aware of a case involving an exchange student from the University of Kent who had returned to France on Thursday, March 12.

But Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, told the House of Commons that the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) was only informed on March 14.

He has defended the response to the outbreak but promised to review “the handling of UKHSA’s (UK Health Security Agency) response at every point, because inevitably there are always things that we can learn and seek to do better”.

The first person to have died from the meningitis outbreak in Canterbury is understood to be an 18-year-old sixth-former named Juliette.Having first fallen ill on Thursday, she was off sick from Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Faversham on Friday before being admitted to hospital. She died in the early hours of Saturday morning.

But East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust did not inform the UKHSA until Saturday night. On the same day, an unnamed 21-year-old student at the University of Kent also died at the trust, with more seriously ill young adults being admitted.Questions have been raised about whether the trust was quick enough to alert the UKHSA to the suspected cases, with one health source suggesting they had waited for laboratory results to confirm the disease – a decision that goes against standard protocols.

One isolated case is not uncommon – there is about one such incident every day in the UK in a typical year – but critics have suggested health chiefs should have been quicker to establish the “cluster” in order to shut down some social events.It is not yet clear if more than one person with suspected meningitis was in hospital before the first alert was raised.

The first case, reported on Friday night, was not in itself a cause for concern, and when during the course of Saturday, the UKHSA discovered a French exchange student was being treated in hospital after visiting the University of Kent, it said it could not establish a link because both had lived in separate “private accommodation”.

A spokesman for the French health ministry said the person admitted to hospital with a case of invasive meningococcal disease was in a “stable condition”.

“All necessary management measures have been taken to limit the risk of transmission,” he added.

By Saturday night, East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust informed the UKHSA of the growing crisis and it became clear there was “a cluster”.

At 10am on Sunday a “full scale” response was organised with contact tracing underway.

This led to health officials using Instagram to contact staff at Chemistry, a nightclub in Canterbury which is now known to be at the centre of the outbreak, asking them to get in touch.

But more confusion was set to ensue, with students saying “rumours were afloat” of the outbreak long before a public announcement was made.

Helen Whately, MP for Faversham and Mid Kent and a former health minister, said she wanted UKHSA to “explain the timeline”.

“I first heard about the outbreak through picking it up on the internet, on Facebook on Sunday evening, but it sounds like actually they knew about it earlier than that,” she told Times Radio.

“I didn’t get an update myself until I contacted the Health Secretary first thing on Monday morning. I then had a briefing from the chief executive of UKHSA, Susan Hopkins, and we spoke about the importance of reaching the schoolkids, as well as the students from the university because of the mixing.

“But there is a question about could that have been acted on quicker if there’d been more public engagement sooner.”

Oliver Contreras, a masters Law student at the University of Kent, criticised the institution for its delay in letting students know.

He said he was “not so happy” about the university letting people know “a bit too late”.

“All these social events went ahead on Sunday, and I was at one of them, and I kind of wish I’d got more information before all that,” he said.

Confusion was compounded for pupils and parents on Monday morning when they found out that schools in the area had been affected.

A parent of a child at Queen Elizabeth, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “Reading between the lines, it sounds like the school were unimpressed about the fact that the UKHSA hadn’t been in contact by Sunday evening, when a pupil had already died.

“I think parents, and the school, had a right to know as soon as there were cases, especially when families get together for Mothers’ Day and I think other parents feel the same way. Maybe the outbreak could have been halted sooner.”

Meningitis is a contagious infection of the protective membranes that surround the brain and spinal cord. It can be transmitted by asymptomatic carriers, infecting anyone of any age, but is most common in babies, children and young adults, particularly university-age students.

“All necessary management measures have been taken to limit the risk of transmission,” he added.

By Saturday night, East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust informed the UKHSA of the growing crisis and it became clear there was “a cluster”.

At 10am on Sunday a “full scale” response was organised with contact tracing underway.

This led to health officials using Instagram to contact staff at Che mistry, a nightclub in Canterbury which is now known to be at the centre of the outbreak, asking them to get in touch.

But more confusion was set to ensue, with students saying “rumours were afloat” of the outbreak long before a public announcement was made.

Helen Whately, MP for Faversham and Mid Kent and a former health minister, said she wanted UKHSA to “explain the timeline”.

“I first heard about the outbreak through picking it up on the internet, on Facebook on Sunday evening, but it sounds like actually they knew about it earlier than that,” she told Times Radio.

“But there is a question about could that have been acted on quicker if there’d been more public engagement sooner.”

Oliver Contreras, a masters Law student at the University of Kent, criticised the institution for its delay in letting students know.

He said he was “not so happy” about the university letting people know “a bit too late”.

“All these social events went ahead on Sunday, and I was at one of them, and I kind of wish I’d got more information before all that,” he said.

Confusion was compounded for pupils and parents on Monday morning when they found out that schools in the area had been affected.

The strain in the Kent outbreak is meningitis B, or MenB, a serious type of bacterial infection.

Eighteen young people have been taken to hospital, with 2,500 students prescribed antibiotics to protect them from the infection.

The UKHSA has said the situation was being treated as a “national incident”.

Mr Streeting said the response was being managed nationally, but said it was not a national health emergency.