A baby has died after contracting an unidentified strain of the meningococcal disease in Darwin on the weekend, but authorities don’t believe it’s connected to an outbreak in Central Australia.
The child, who was attending a childcare centre in Darwin’s outer suburbs, died in hospital on Sunday evening.
Centre for Disease Control (CDC) physician Dr Charles Douglas expressed his sympathy for the family, and said although the child was taken for medical treatment early on, the disease progressed too quickly.
Douglas was not able to give any other details about the child. There hasn’t been a meningococcal death in the Northern Territory since 2015.
Northern Territory staff of the CDC were distributing preventative antibiotics to the childcare centre, and once the results of a postmortem determined which strain of the disease the baby died from, the CDC may also offer a vaccine to those who were in close contact.
While Douglas said it was a rare and terrible disease, he emphasised it was “very hard to catch meningococcal”.
“You have to be in very close contact for a considerable period of time in order to catch it. It’s not like the flu, it’s not like the common cold.”
However the disease can progress between 12 and 24 hours after a child is infected.
The CDC was also waiting on test results to determine if the child’s death was connected to an outbreak of meningococcal W in Central Australia, but Douglas said it was “extremely unlikely”.
He confirmed 27 people have presented with meningococcal W since early September, all Indigenous, and most of them children. Just three cases were recorded in 2016.
There was an outbreak of meningococcal W nationally, with 182 cases reported this year by the end of August, and Douglas said central Australia was seeing “a particularly bad slice of that”.
There had been a considerable number of deaths nationally this year, he said, and “there’s an understandable anxiety”.
The prevalence of the W strain has been increasing in most jurisdictions since 2013, according to the federal Department of Health.
The main strains of meningococcal are A, C, W and Y, and all those could be vaccinated against with a privately available vaccine. In the NT children are vaccinated against C at 12 months of age.
However in response to the outbreak it was now being distributed to every person in a remote community between one and 19 years of age, and to every Indigenous person living in Katherine, Alice Springs and Tennant Creek.
The NT is working to introduce the vaccine for every NT child at 12 months, beginning early next year, and there are ongoing negotiations with the federal government about expanding it nationally.
Five other states – New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria and Tasmania – have announced ACWY vaccine programs to commence this year, targeting older teenagers.
