My adored brother told us he felt ill – days later he was dead from the strain of meningitis so few are vaccinated against

Hours before leaving for the music festival he had been looking forward to for weeks, George Zographou told his older sister Nicole that he wasn’t feeling well.

‘He said he felt bad,’ he says. ‘So much so that he thought about leaving after a day, but there was a band he particularly wanted to see and he was leaving his friends. He didn’t want to disappoint them.’

And so it was that 18-year-old George left the family home in Bristol one afternoon in August 2017 and headed to the popular annual Boardmasters Festival in Newquay, Cornwall.

It’s a rite of passage for thousands of students like George who have recently sat their A-level exams.

But unlike everyone else that year, George, a popular and handsome young man who had everything to live for, did not return home.

Within 24 hours of arriving at the festival, his condition gradually worsened and he had a heart attack. He never regained consciousness and died five days later at the Royal Cornwall Hospital when his life support machine was switched off.

George didn’t do drugs or drink. He suffered from meningitis B (MenB), a fatal bacterial infection; When this infection overcomes the body’s defenses, it can enter the bloodstream and infect the fluid around the brain and spinal cord, causing inflammation in the brain and spinal cord linings.

Tragically, paramedics at the festival failed to notice the signs. “I think they saw a six-foot-tall lad and thought he was drinking,” Nicole told me.

‘His presentation was atypical as he had no fever, but there were symptoms that should have alarmed them. ‘If he had been given antibiotics he might have survived.’

Mother Elaine, son George and sister Nicole. On an afternoon in August 2017, George left the family home in Bristol and headed to the popular annual Boardmasters Festival in Newquay, Cornwall.

Elaine with her son George, who died of misdiagnosed meningitis at a music festival nine years ago

Nine years later, it’s one of the many ‘ifs’ faced by Nicole and her grieving parents – mother Elaine, 72, and father Andrew, 58 – who continue to be devastated by George’s death.

‘Something like this doesn’t go away,’ says Nicole. ‘You carry the trauma with you forever. ‘I never stopped thinking about it.’

This week, that trauma was brought brutally to the fore with news of a deadly meningitis outbreak in Kent that killed two teenagers, one of whom, like George, was just 18, and left 11 seriously ill.

‘It brought back some very difficult memories,’ says Nicole. ‘I was truly devastated to see what was happening there and how many young people were affected.’

Notably, on Tuesday, the UK Health Safety Agency said some cases had been confirmed to be MenB, the strain that killed George.

It turned out that all those affected were young people.

Nicole, 37, lives in Cardiff with her partner, but grew up with George in Bristol.

There was a decade between Nicole and her much sought-after little sister, and she was the protective big sister through and through.

He remembers young George as ‘absolutely crazy’. ‘He had so much energy he didn’t stop,’ he says. This energetic little boy has grown into a strong teenager who hopes to study international business and Spanish at the University of Birmingham.

Nicole believes meningococcal bacteria was already in her brother’s system when he left for the festival on Thursday, August 10. ‘But even though he said he wasn’t feeling 100 per cent, none of us thought he was too well to go.’

George is pictured as a child with his father Andrew. A CT scan showed George had suffered a catastrophic brain injury, meaning he would never be able to breathe on his own.

Nicole was also on a trip to Ibiza with her friends that day, and they said goodbye to her before leaving.

‘Then after he arrived he texted me saying he wasn’t feeling well and I told him he didn’t need to push himself, he just needed to rest.’ He paused. ‘That was the last time I contacted him.’

Piecing together the terrifying events from George’s friends over the next 24 hours, what he and his parents now know is that George’s condition continues to deteriorate dramatically.

‘George gave an unusual presentation and it’s one of the things I always want to cover because it reinforces the importance of knowing all the signs and symptoms of meningococcal disease and the fact that they don’t all or all occur at the same time,’ says Nicole.

‘In George’s case, although he did not have a fever, he was feeling increasingly ill. He vomited twice the first night. ‘He stayed in his tent and did not come out.’

The next morning he could not support his weight. ‘He was struggling to walk and had a mottled, bruised, non-swelling rash on the top of his foot that resembled a tribal marking. He felt so bad that his friends called paramedics.’

George was taken to a medical tent – he could barely stand at this point – where, after a battery of tests, he was diagnosed with a stress fracture and dehydration, even though his heart rate was three times the normal level.

George was then taken to the welfare tent to recover and wait for his parents to pick him up, where he quickly became confused and agitated.

In one of his last communications, he sent a message to a friend: ‘I think I’m dying.’ He suffered a heart attack shortly afterwards and while he was resuscitated by staff, he never regained consciousness.

Nicole was scrambling to get home from Ibiza and arrived at her brother’s hospital bedside ten hours later.

What he found was devastating: his brother was in a coma, surrounded by machines and cables. ‘When I arrived the doctors still had no idea what was going on,’ he recalls. ‘And within 12 hours of me being there they found bacteria in his blood that indicated meningococcal disease.’

When Nicole heard about her brother’s condition, she scrambled to get home from Ibiza and arrived at his hospital bedside ten hours later.

Nicole and George. George remained on life support for five days, allowing him to say goodbye to many of his friends

Devastatingly, a CT scan showed George had suffered a catastrophic brain injury, meaning he would never be able to breathe on his own.

‘It was like being in a movie,’ says Nicole. ‘You end up in a kind 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, giving many of his friends the opportunity to say goodbye.

With his parents’ approval, doctors removed life support, and just after 1.30pm on August 16, George breathed his last while holding the hands of his parents and sister. ‘It was important as a family that we were there when the machine was turned off, but I feel like George really died alone in that relief tent,’ Nicole says quietly.

‘He had been discharged from the medical tent and was alone, agitated and scared when he had a heart attack. And it’s so hard to think about it.’

Following George’s death, his family had to digest the difficult news that it was George’s third case of meningitis linked to his sixth form college in Bristol in the past year.

‘A year ago a young girl died. The college sent a letter warning families about this issue. “We thought George was protected from meningitis because he had the vaccine, but of course that wasn’t true,” says Nicole.

Like most people born before 2015, George was vaccinated with the MenACWY vaccine, which provides immunity against meningococcal groups A, C, W and Y; however, it did not confer immunity against MenB, the deadliest and most common type.

A MenB vaccine has been introduced for babies since 2015, but anyone born before then could only receive it if it was purchased privately.

“I don’t want to panic people, but if there is a young person going to university or college (crowded environments and new social groups where bacteria can spread), I would recommend that they consider making the MenB vaccine available exclusively in pharmacies,” says Nicole.

George would now be 27 years old, and every day the family agonized over the fact that they would never see the man he would become.

‘We’re still close with their friends, so we’ve seen them graduate, get jobs, and in some cases get married, and of course that’s what we want for them, but it’s also incredibly painful to see,’ says Nicole.

‘There’s a sadness in everything we do right now that we can’t share with him, and that’s not easy. ‘You just need to find a new normal.’