Star comment: Meningitis vaccine will help children
Prevention is better than cure. That proverb has been around since time immemorial, a nod to the fact that it's easier to stop something bad from happening in the first place than to fix the damage after it has happened.
Adam Cheshire's family wish they'd been the beneficiaries of preventative medicine.
It might have stopped their son from developing the Group B Strep form of meningitis. The illness cost Adam his hearing and led to a range of complex health issues.
It could have been prevented. Routine diagnostic checks of Adam's mother, Charlotte, during her pregnancy would have detected the risk factors and preventative steps could have followed. Other nations, including Canada, which was once Charlotte's home, conduct such tests. Great Britain, however, does not.
And children like Adam are the price that the NHS pays for not investing in those strategies.
Babies will now be offered a meningitis B vaccine. It means that there will be far fewer deaths and long-term illnesses. It means that the savage emotional costs on families will be lower. It means that children will live happier, less-difficult and healthier lives.
And yet the vaccine is not enough to help everyone. Nor will it necessarily prevent the life-long effects of the disease. Meningitis is frequently difficult to diagnose and usually arrives suddenly. It can often be confused with flu because many symptoms are the same.
Additional screening can prevent the onset of the disease. It is difficult to understand why they are not used routinely here in Britain. Such tests in other developed nations have helped to reduce the risk of infection among newborns by as much as 86 per cent. And that means fewer babies suffering brain damage, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, paralysis, amputations, blindness, hearing loss and learning difficulties.
It also means there is a direct and substantial saving to health care providers, who no longer have to invest in expensive, life-long treatments.
Moreover, lives would not be damaged as gravely as they are under the current wait-and-see regime. Lessons ought to be learned from the experience of families like the Cheshires. Policy directives ought to follow and young children, like Adam, would be spared the debilitating and invidious effects of meningitis.
