Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many people have been diagnosed with meningitis in each of the last five years.

Public Health England (PHE) collects data on laboratory confirmed cases of invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) which is a major cause of bacterial meningitis in England. The data do not distinguish between IMD presentation as meningitis or septicaemia. National data on the number of cases of IMD in England are published by PHE based on the number of laboratory confirmed cases.

Table 1: Number of laboratory confirmed cases of IMD in England by epidemiological year: 2010/11 to 2014/15.

Source: PHE Health Protection Report, 2015