Five-year-old girl becomes ninth child to die after contracting Strep A

A five-year-old girl has sadly passed away after contracting Strep A, making her the ninth child to die after becoming ill with the infection.

The girl, who went to the Black Mountain Primary School in Northern Ireland, became severely ill last week before being treated at the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children.

Tragically she passed away on Monday, December 5th.

According to the BBC, the Public Health Agency (PHA) sent a letter to parents of children at the school on Friday, asking them to attend a clinic to be seen by a doctor and receive a preventative course of antibiotics.

Black Mountain Primary has said the girl’s death was a tragic loss, as it seeks to reassure parents that it was working closely with the PHA.

Meanwhile across the rest of the UK, seven children in England and one in Wales have sadly died since September as a result of complications from Strep A bacterial infections.

The message from health officials is for parents to be vigilant, and that while most cases of Strep A are mild, if your child deteriorates rapidly you should seek urgent medical advice.

According to some experts, the UK is experiencing this outbreak due to the last two years of the Covid pandemic where children didn’t mix as much.

This means their systems are not immune to a number of different infections, and there’s been a warning that the number of cases of both Strep A and scarlet fever will rise in the next few weeks.

The chairman of the GP committee of the British Medical Association, Dr Alan Stout, has said that the number of deaths among children in the UK was ‘slightly unusual’.

He said: “The last proper outbreak was four or five years ago, there were maybe four deaths associated with that – not even direct effect, but associated with the infection. So to get to eight or nine now [across the UK] is slightly unusual.”

Warning signs of the invasive disease include a fever (a high temperature above 38C) and severe muscle aches.

The UKHSA is advising anyone with a high fever, severe muscle aches, pain in one area of the body and unexplained vomiting or diarrhoea to seek urgent medical assistance.