Meningitis: Vaccination
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment his Department has made of trends in the level of Meningitis B cases among teenagers and university students; and what steps he is taking to help reduce that level.
Answered by Ashley Dalton
The UK Health Security Agency continually monitors the incidence and profile of invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) in England across all age groups to provide information to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to help inform policy decisions.
The United Kingdom has a world-leading meningococcal vaccine programme, and we were the first country to introduce a national Meningitis C (MenC) vaccine programme in 1999 and an infant programme targeting Meningitis B (MenB) disease in 2015, the year in which the teenage MenACWY vaccination was also introduced.
Cases of IMD in England have fallen from over 2,500 in 1998/99, before the first routine meningococcal vaccination against MenC, was introduced, to 378 cases in 2024/225. The MenACWY vaccine also stops carriage and transmission. With this high population-level control of MenACWY disease, MenB disease accounted for 313 of the 378, or 83% of, cases in 2024/25.
MenB remains rare but is now the leading cause of meningococcal disease in all age groups in England, including teenagers and young adults. Further information for the 2024 to 2025 epidemiological year, running from July 2024 to June 2025, is available at the following link:
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