Strep A home-testing kits have sold out online as parents rush to find ways to diagnose their children’s rashes and high temperatures.
The panic-buying follows the deaths of at least 16 children from invasive strep A infections in the UK, with the latest fatality involving a secondary school pupil at Hove Park school in Hove on Friday.
Strep A infections are caused by strains of the streptococcus pyogenes bacterium that normally causes mild illness such as sore throats or skin infections but can infect lungs and the bloodstream, triggering serious and life-threatening symptoms.
As infections and deaths from strep A have risen over the past few weeks, parents have turned to tests that involve a long cotton swab that is lightly passed over the back of the throat. Solutions and a strip test are then used to display results.
These tests are now being sold online for more than £100, while some retailers have reported selling out after demand soared over the past few days. Other suppliers have warned customers that they will not be able to get hold of a test until after Christmas. One online retailer told customers that they would not be able to get the products until mid-January. Others said they were awaiting deliveries but “there may be delays beyond our control”.
Strep A tests are not sold in England through the NHS because the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) – which approves and advises on clinical care – has said their accuracy is uncertain and likely to be “highly variable”. Scotland has not approved them either, though in Wales people can buy them over the counter for £7.50.
“We’re not advising using those [tests] for the time being,” Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said on Friday. “It is a clinical diagnosis. It is not too difficult to make. So long as the parent watches their child and brings their child in, then we are more than happy to see them.”
Testing currently involves a swab being taken by doctors, which is then sent off to a lab to be checked. The information is used to confirm an infection and then for contact tracing.
The UK Health Security Agency said that doctors were seeing a higher level of infections compared with previous years. Data published on Thursday shows that among one- to four-year-olds, there were 2.3 infections per 100,000 of the population, up from 0.5 in the three years leading up to the Covid pandemic.
Incidences are higher than the pre-Covid years across all age groups, with those aged 75 and over the only ones having a higher rate than the one- to four-year-olds.
GPs have been told to use a “low threshold” in prescribing antibiotics, including penicillin and amoxicillin, to treat the illness, but parents and pharmacists have said they have faced difficulties getting them. The government claims there are enough supplies.
“There probably is stock somewhere in the system, but if it’s not available through my wholesalers, I can’t get it,” one pharmacist told the Observer. “I have enough smaller doses for under-sixes, but for the older children there is nothing available. On Friday, I dealt with 10 calls from people ringing around trying to get antibiotics for their kids, but we are running out.”
Simon Butterworth, 61, who runs his pharmacy in Hawkshead, said that there were no antibiotics for strep A available from the three main wholesalers used by pharmacists in the UK.
“The situation at the moment is pretty much unprecedented: in my 40 years as a pharmacist, I have seen nothing like it in my professional lifetime. There are shortages of medicines across the board, and prices have gone up, which means we can make a loss on some medication.”
The Department of Health and Social Care said there was no supplier shortage of antibiotics to treat strep A, but added that “we sometimes have surges for products and increased demand [which] means that some pharmacies are having difficulties obtaining certain antibiotics”.
