Genetic mutation explains severity of Kent meningitis B outbreak

In the spring of 2026, a nightclub in Canterbury became the site of an outbreak that would claim two young lives and send nine others to intensive care — not through ordinary misfortune, but because a bacterium had quietly rewritten part of its own genetic code. Scientists at UKHSA and Oxford have now traced the unusual severity of Kent's meningitis B outbreak to horizontal gene transfer, a process by which bacteria absorb foreign genetic material and emerge as something the immune system has never learned to recognise. The existing vaccine offers protection against this new variant, but the d