Did baby Kia get a horrific meningitis strain because the vaccine was withdrawn months before she was born?
VIKKI Mitchell is at her daughter Kia’s hospital bedside every morning by 8am. She spends the day talking to her, stroking her hair, willing her to keep fighting.
The nurses at the high- dependency unit at Leeds General Infirmary, where 11-month-old Kia is being treated, have told Vikki that they have never seen a baby so sick pull through.
The doctors remind her more often than she needs to be reminded that her daughter still may not survive.
But Vikki is clinging to hope, because that’s all she’s got.
That Kia is still with us is nothing short of a miracle. In the early hours of September 24, she was rushed to hospital with meningitis C. So severe was the blood poisoning raging through her tiny body that her arms and legs had turned black.
She has since had all four of her limbs amputated — the last, her left arm, two weeks ago — and lies in her bed, hooked up to tubes and wires and monitors, clinging to life.
Vikki and her partner, Kia’s father Paul Gott, are, of course, devastated. Seeing their baby girl lying helpless in hospital, swaddled in bandages, ‘kills us’ every day.
Their devastation is compounded by anger, too. For if Kia had been born just months earlier, she may not have contracted meningitis at all.
In July 2016, the meningitis C vaccine, routinely offered to all babies in the UK at 12 weeks old to protect them from that particular strain of the disease, was quietly withdrawn from the national vaccination programme. Instead, it was decided that the vaccine would be given at 12 months.
Ten months earlier, in September 2015, the meningitis B vaccine — offering protection against the more common strain — had been introduced on the NHS and was being offered to babies at eight weeks old.
According to the Meningitis Research Foundation, one of the reasons the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation, which advises the Government, decided to withdraw the meningitis C vaccine at 12 weeks was because incident rates had dropped significantly, and it was believed that the new meningitis B jab, a breakthrough vaccine, would also offer some protection against meningitis C, too.
Another factor was the introduction in September 2015 of another meningitis vaccine, known as ACWY and given to children at the age of 14, which would help build ‘ herd immunity’ that would also protect babies and young children.
But it didn’t protect Kia Gott. In the past few days, Vikki and Paul have begun a petition calling for the meningitis C vaccine to be reinstated at 12 weeks. The number of infants contracting meningitis C remains low, but it has risen since the vaccine at that age was withdrawn.
Statistics released by Public Health england show that in 2015-16 (from July 1 to June 30), two children up to the age of five contracted the disease; in the year 2016-17, the figure had risen to six. In babies up to 12 months, the figure rose from one case in 2015-16 to four in 2016-17.
‘We’re devastated,’ says Vikki. ‘every day, I wake up feeling sick. We’ve been told that Kia might not survive, but I’m holding on to hope because that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. We had no idea the meningitis C vaccine had been stopped at 12 weeks. We were told the numbers of babies who contracted it was very low — but, in our view, one case is one too many.
‘We’d have had the injection privately if we’d known. Our lives have been destroyed by this. Kia’s life as it should have been has been taken away from her.’
Two weeks ago, Vikki and Paul received a heartfelt letter from Sophie, Countess of Wessex — the wife of Prince edward and a mother of two — who is a patron of the Meningitis Now charity.
She’d heard about Kia and felt moved to get in touch.
‘I wanted to write to you after learning about your beautiful baby daughter, Kia,’ she wrote. ‘I am completely heartbroken and devastated by Kia’s prognosis and can’t begin to imagine how you are feeling at this impossibly difficult time.
‘I am so very sorry for what you are going through. I know words are inconsequential, but I felt compelled to reach out. I wish you peace, strength and hope as Kia rebuilds her strength and I send my love to your family.’
‘It was a very nice letter,’ says Vikki. ‘There was a telephone number on the letter, so we called to invite Sophie to come to see Kia. We were told she was in Bangladesh [the Countess was on a solo tour of the country], but we hope to hear from her now that she is back.’
Since Kia was admitted to hospital in September, Vikki has kept a vigil at her daughter’s bedside and has been sleeping in hospital accommodation, while Paul stays at the family home near Bradford, West Yorkshire, and looks after their two elder children, Kayden, nine, and four-year-old elsie.
Kia has had to have huge doses of painkiller drugs — including fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than morphine, and ketamine, an anaesthetic — which are administered intravenously through a Hickman line fitted into her chest.
DOCTORS
are now slowly withdrawing these drugs. She is fed high- calorie formula milk through a nasogastric tube.
After contracting a chest infection last week, this week Kia’s condition appears to have improved slightly.
Now less heavily sedated, it brought her mum and dad enormous joy last week to see her open her eyes. ‘I held her yesterday on my knee,’ says Vikki, with a triumphant smile.
‘When I spoke to her, she turned her head to me. The past few days, she has been a bit more responsive. She’s had her eyes open.’ It may seem a tiny thing, but doctors had initially warned that Kia was likely to be left significantly brain damaged, blind and deaf.
Then the smile fades again. ‘ When you’re at someone’s hospital bedside, you naturally go to hold their hand. But I can’t do that. So I stroke her face and hair and talk to her,’ says Vikki.
‘We’ve been amazed at how she keeps going after everything that’s been thrown at her — she’s such a little fighter.’
Kia’s fight for life began on September 23. That day, she developed a high temperature and was poorly. Vikki put her to bed with a bottle at 9.30pm, and the family went to bed.
At around 2am, Vikki and Paul were awoken by the sound of Kia retching. ‘ We rushed into her room and switched on the light,’ recalls Vikki. ‘ She had what looked like bruises all over her face. They seemed to be appearing before my very eyes.
‘We guessed straight away what it was and called an ambulance.
‘On the way to hospital, they drilled into the bone to get drugs into her and slit the skin on her leg to try to get the blood flowing, but it didn’t work.
‘When we arrived at hospital, an anaesthetist tried to get a line into her artery, but couldn’t. She said if she couldn’t get a line in, that would be it. Thankfully, another anaesthetist managed to do it.
‘The doctors didn’t know which strain of meningitis Kia had. They were pumping antibiotics into her, but the medication wasn’t working. Her arms and legs were black.
‘They do a test to show the level of infection. A normal is level around the number five — Kia’s was 200-plus.
‘We were told it was the worst case of meningitis the doctors had ever seen and that, if we hadn’t been woken up, we’d have awoken the next morning to a dead baby.’
Kia was given drugs to keep her heart going. Doctors told Vikki, 30, and Paul, a 35- year- old window fitter, that there was no option other than to amputate Kia’s limbs if she were to have a chance of surviving.
‘The doctors explained how the body works in such circumstances,’ says Vikki.
‘It says to itself: “I don’t need my extremities, but I need my organs” — so blood is diverted away from the arms and legs,
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