Unusual and Unexpected: the Meningitis Outbreak the Media Wants You to Fear
With meningitis B dominating the news cycle and the unexplained deaths of students in Kent circulating across social media, one must ask: what are the real causes of this outbreak, and is it truly as dangerous as it appears?
The media is trained to frame events in ways that create a sense of urgency, generating and propagating fear among audiences. This is what academics call media framing and the social imaginary. Framing involves omitting certain details and selecting others in order to influence public opinion. Media framings are used by newspapers and social media to convey meaning and emphasise one particular interpretation over others. Social imaginaries, meanwhile, are the ways people imagine their shared social existence through common meanings. Together, social imaginaries and media framings allow the media to set the agenda by selecting which stories receive attention and which measures should be taken.
This is very much the case with the recent outbreak of meningitis B. The BBC and other social media videos have used words such as "unusual" and labelled its coverage "breaking news." However, the outbreak is neither unusual nor out of the ordinary. Infectious diseases have always been part of human life. The alarm appears to stem partly from the fact that a mandatory vaccine for meningitis B was only introduced in 2015 for babies, yet meningitis itself is nothing new.
The BBC's coverage has tended to focus on the number of deaths and the role of a nightclub in Kent as the apparent source, without providing fuller context. Crucial questions remain unanswered: did those affected seek hospital treatment immediately? Did they share vapes or drinks? These questions are left unaddressed, despite it being acknowledged that transmission is possible through exactly such means. Meanwhile, the UK Health Minister has insisted that the public should not panic, describing the disease as rare and nothing like Covid. The tension between these two positions, a media insisting on urgency and a government urging calm, is a precice illustration of the CNN effect (media driving policy) at work.
Infectious diseases are, in any case, nothing new. Experts warn they are expected to grow in frequency alongside climate change. Josie Golding, an expert at Wellcome, has stated that climate change drives the spread of diseases with “rising temperatures, floods, and droughts that create ideal conditions for mosquitoes, ticks, and harmful bacteria to thrive, while extreme weather adds strain to already fragile health systems.”
In that sense, the meningitis B outbreak is not an inexplicable event. It is, rather, a symptom of a long-term structural problem that is being left unaddressed, too complex for easy solutions, too slow-moving for the news cycle. By framing this as something "unexpected," the media shifts responsibility away from states and presents it as a natural catastrophe, echoing the Malthusian tendency to attribute systemic failures to nature rather than policy.
That said, it is equally important not to overstate the picture of decline. Modern technologies such as telemedicine, gene editing, and artificial intelligence are enabling doctors to detect and treat illnesses more precisely and effectively than ever before. In his landmark 2007 TED Talk, Hans Rosling debunked widespread pessimism about global development, demonstrating through data that child mortality has fallen sharply and people are living longer. The world, in many respects, is getting better. However, that progress does not render climate change invisible, both things can be true at once.
The meningitis B outbreak is not the simple narrative the media portrays. It is part of a deeper, structural unadressed problem, one that demands long-term thinking, not breaking news alerts.