Meningitis B Vaccine

David Nuttall Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

As always, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Pritchard.

I want to share the story of Charlie. Charlie Edmondson is a lively, boisterous four-year-old. I know him because he attends the Sunday school at St Anne’s church in Tottington in my constituency where, for the past seven years, I have been one of the church wardens.

Last year, at midnight on 15 December, just two days after Charlie took part in the Sunday school’s annual Christingle and nativity play, he woke up and complained to his mum, Rose, that he was not feeling very well. He had a high temperature, but his twin sister had been ill the previous week and his parents had not felt 100%, so his mum understandably thought Charlie was probably going down with a similar bug.

Rose tried to get Charlie’s temperature down with Calpol and some Nurofen, but the next morning he woke at 6 am looking extremely pale, with dark rings under his eyes, and his breathing seemed quite fast. His mother put the symptoms down to a viral infection and assumed he would start to feel better after he had been sick. Never in a million years did she think it could be meningitis.

Charlie went downstairs and, after some more Calpol and ibuprofen, he seemed to perk up and managed to eat some breakfast. At about 10 am, as he and his mum settled down to watch Tim Peake go up in a space rocket, something that would normally excite the imagination of any young boy, he started to chat less and became quieter. At that point, his mum became concerned about a pinprick rash that had appeared. It did not look like a typical viral rash, and doubts started to form in her mind.

After they had watched Tim Peake go into space, Rose noticed Charlie was staring vacantly at the television, but she put that down to him perhaps being a little sleepy. Shortly after that, Charlie was sick, and he fell asleep next to his mum on the couch. As his mum said:

“I don’t know what prevented me from putting him in his bed and to keep him on the couch—it would have been so easy to do that and he may not have been so lucky.”

While Charlie was napping, his mum noticed what she thought was a bruise on his upper leg, with one on his arm and another small one near his neck. Rose knew that was a potential sign of blood poisoning, and she started to piece together the other symptoms. She looked at the Meningitis Now website for the checklist of symptoms. She called her husband, who told her to call their GP. Unfortunately, the GP closed at lunchtime, but she was put through to an out-of-hours doctor, who told her to call 999 immediately. She decided to check the rash, to see if it disappeared with a glass— it did not.

Rose called 999 and was told that an ambulance would be sent straight away. When the fast-response car arrived, Charlie was lying on his side on the couch. He immediately had antibiotics administered to him. The ambulance arrived about five minutes later and took him to the Royal Bolton hospital, which, as his mum said, did “an absolutely amazing job”. The hospital staff explained everything they were doing, including when they decided to induce Charlie into a coma and he was transferred to the intensive care unit at Alder Hey children’s hospital. At that point, they told his mother that they were treating him for meningitis B.

Charlie stayed in Alder Hey until Christmas day, including eight days in intensive care. He received fantastic care and treatment, but his family were disappointed that they were not given more information about meningitis and its after-effects. At this point, however, I will place on the record the enormous help that the charity Meningitis Now gave to Charlie and his family. I know that they are all extremely grateful. The charity sent them lots of information and they found that reading others’ stories helped them to understand the impact that the disease can have. It helped them to cope.

Unfortunately, three days after Charlie’s initial discharge, he was readmitted to the Royal Bolton and then Alder Hey, as he was struggling to stand and walk. The doctors suspected he might have a bone infection. That meant another week in hospital, including over new year, but he was finally discharged, with much more mobility, as the doctors discovered that the problem was inflammation around his ankle and hip joints. As an MMR scan confirmed, the meningitis had scarred his bones. It was two months before Charlie could walk and stand properly.

Charlie will continue to be monitored by Alder Hey for the next few years, to keep an eye on his growth plates. As Charlie’s mum said:

“I will be forever grateful that Charlie can say he has survived meningitis and I want him to remember how lucky he is and we are that he is still here despite being hit with such an awful, awful disease.

The speed at which this disease acts is frightening and the symptoms can be so easily confused with other things. This is why it’s so very important to recognise the signs and symptoms quickly.”

I hope that one benefit of this afternoon’s debate will be that more people learn the signs and symptoms, and know what to do. Understandably, Charlie’s parents want to see the roll-out of an improved meningitis B vaccination programme, so that others will never have to go through what they had to go through. Mr and Mrs Edmondson did not know that they could have vaccinated their children privately until the consultant told them that he had vaccinated his children because he knew how important it was.

I appreciate that even with the increased resources being made available to our NHS, the advances in medical science, new treatments, new drugs and a growing and ageing population inevitably mean that difficult decisions have to be made. Of course it will be costly to vaccinate even up to only the five-year-old age group, but when one considers the loss of life, the cost of treating cases such as Charlie’s—which one healthcare professional put at £30,000 to £40,000—and the suffering of children such as Charlie, along with the heartache, anxiety and distress of the parents, the cost of the vaccination suddenly starts to look very cheap indeed.

As you know, Mr Pritchard, I am not one to present problems without trying to find a solution for Government, so let me suggest another source of funding: the millions of pounds spent on trying to persuade adults who, despite years and years of warnings about the dangers of smoking, nevertheless continue to do so. If they have not stopped by now, when will they? Those adults have a choice and they choose to continue to smoke. Some of the millions spent on increasingly ineffective stop-smoking campaigns could be spent on children, who have no choice.