Hours before he left for the music festival he had been looking forward to for weeks, George Zographou confided in his older sister Nicole that he didn’t feel very well.
‘He said he was feeling under the weather,’ she says. ‘So much so that he contemplated leaving a day later, but there was a band he particularly wanted to see, and he was giving his friends a lift. He didn’t want to let them down.’
And so 18-year-old George did leave the family home in Bristol that August afternoon in 2017, heading to the popular annual Boardmasters Festival in Newquay, Cornwall.
It’s a rite of passage for thousands of students who, like George, have recently sat their A-level exams.
Unlike everyone else that year, however, George – a popular, handsome teenager with everything to live for – did not return home.
Within 24 hours of arriving at the festival, his condition worsening all the while, he went into cardiac arrest. He never recovered consciousness, and died five days later in the Royal Cornwall Hospital when his life support machine was switched off.
George had not taken drugs or been drinking. He was suffering from meningitis B (MenB), a deadly bacterial infection which, when it overcomes the body’s defences, can enter the bloodstream and infect the fluid around the brain and spinal cord, causing inflammation in the brain and spinal cord linings.
Tragically, medics at the festival had failed to spot the signs. ‘I think they saw a six-foot-four lad and assumed he’d been drinking,’ Nicole tells me.
‘His presentation wasn’t typical as he didn’t have a fever, but there were symptoms that should have put them on alert. If he had been given antibiotics he might have survived.’
Hours before he left for the music festival George Zographou (right) confided in his older sister Nicole (left) that he didn’t feel very well
Mum Elaine, son George and sister Nicole. George left the family home in Bristol that August afternoon in 2017, heading to the popular annual Boardmasters Festival in Newquay, Cornwall
Elaine with her son George who died from misdiagnosed meningitis nine years ago at a music festival
Nine years on, it is one of the many ‘if onlys’ faced by Nicole and her grieving parents – mum Elaine, 72, and dad Andrew, 58 – who remain devastated by George’s death.
‘Something like this doesn’t go away,’ says Nicole. ‘You carry the trauma with you for ever. I’ve never stopped thinking about it.’
This week, that trauma has been brought grimly to the fore with news of a deadly meningitis outbreak in Kent that has left two young people dead – one, like George, just 18 – and 11 gravely ill.
‘It’s brought back some very tricky memories,’ Nicole says. ‘I’ve been really devastated to see what’s happening there and how many young people have been affected.’
Particularly as, on Tuesday, the UK Health Security Agency said some of the cases had been confirmed as MenB, the strain that killed George.
It is understood that all of those affected are young people.
Nicole, 37, lives in Cardiff with her partner, though alongside George, she was raised in Bristol.
There was ten years between Nicole and her much-wanted younger sibling and she was every bit the protective big sister.
She remembers the young George as ‘absolutely bonkers’. ‘He had so much energy, he just didn’t stop,’ she says. That energetic little boy grew into a strapping teenager who hoped to study international business and Spanish at Birmingham University.
Nicole believes the meningococcal bacteria was already in her brother’s system when he left for the festival on Thursday, August 10. ‘But while he said he wasn’t feeling 100 per cent, none of us thought he wasn’t well enough not to go.’
George pictured as a child with his dad Andrew. A CT scan showed George had suffered a catastrophic brain injury which meant he would never be able to breathe on his own
Nicole was also off on a trip that day – departing to Ibiza with friends – and they hugged goodbye before he set off.
‘Later he messaged me after he arrived saying he was feeling unwell, and I replied telling him he didn’t need to push himself, to just rest.’ She pauses. ‘That was the last time I communicated with him.’
What she and her parents now know, having pieced together the dreadful events of the next 24 hours from George’s friends, is that his condition continued to deteriorate dramatically.
‘George had an unusual presentation, and this is one of the things I always want to get across, because it reinforces the importance of knowing all the signs and symptoms of meningococcal disease and the fact they don’t all appear, or all at the same time,’ Nicole says.
‘In George’s case, while he didn’t have a fever, he felt increasingly sick. He vomited twice that first night. He stayed in his tent and didn’t go out.’
By the following morning, he couldn’t bear his weight. ‘He was struggling to walk, and he had a mottled, bruised, non-raised rash that looked like a tribal sign across the top of his foot. He felt so awful his friends called the medics.’
George was escorted to a medical tent – by this point he could barely stand – where, after a number of tests, he was diagnosed with a stress fracture and dehydration, even though his heart rate was triple the normal level.
George was then taken to the wellbeing tent to recover and wait for his parents to collect him, where he rapidly became confused and agitated.
In one of his final communications, he sent a text to a friend which read: ‘I think I’m dying.’ Not long afterwards, he went into cardiac arrest and, while he was resuscitated by staff, he never recovered consciousness.
Nicole scrambled to make the journey home from Ibiza, arriving at her brother’s hospital bedside ten hours later.
What she found was devastating: her brother in a coma, surrounded by machines and wires. ‘When I arrived the doctors still had no idea what had happened,’ she recalls. ‘And then within 12 hours of me being there, they’d found bacteria in his blood, which indicated meningococcal disease.’
Nicole scrambled to make the journey home from Ibiza, when she heard about her brother and arrived at his hospital bedside ten hours later
Nicole and George. George remained on life support for five days, allowing his many friends to say goodbye
Devastatingly, a CT scan showed George had suffered a catastrophic brain injury which meant he would never be able to breathe on his own.
‘It was like being in a film,’ says Nicole. ‘You end up in a sort of dissociative state. You’re there, but at the same time part of you can’t believe this is happening to you.’
George remained on life support for five days, allowing his many friends to say goodbye.
With the consent of his parents, doctors removed life support and on August 16, just after 1.30pm, George took his final breaths as his parents and sister held his hand. ‘As a family it was important we were there when the machine was turned off, but I feel that really, George died alone in that welfare tent,’ Nicole says quietly.
‘He had been discharged from the medical tent, and he was alone, and he was agitated and he was scared when he went into cardiac arrest. And that is very hard to think about.’
In the bewildering aftermath of George’s death, his family had to digest the difficult news that he had been the third meningitis case linked to his Bristol sixth-form college in the past year.
‘The year before, a young girl had died. The college had sent a letter about it alerting families. We thought George was protected from meningitis because he’d been vaccinated – but of course it wasn’t the right one,’ Nicole says.
Like most born before 2015, George had been vaccinated with the MenACWY vaccine, which immunises against meningococcal groups A, C, W and Y – but crucially not MenB, the deadliest and most common strain.
Since 2015, a MenB vaccine has been introduced for infants, but anyone born before then would have had it only if it had been purchased privately.
‘I don’t want to panic people, but if you’ve got a young person going to university or to college – crowded environments and new social groups where the bacteria can spread – I would recommend they think about having the MenB vaccine available privately in pharmacies,’ Nicole says.
George would be 27 now, and every day the family grieves the fact they will never get to see the man he would have become.
‘We’re still close to his friends, so we’ve seen them graduate, get jobs, and in some cases get married, and obviously that’s what we want for them, but at the same time it’s incredibly painful to see,’ Nicole says.
‘With everything we do now there is a sadness that we can’t share it with him, and that doesn’t get any easier. You just have to find a new normal.’
