Guidance

Scarlet fever: managing outbreaks in schools and nurseries

Guidelines to help health protection teams control outbreaks of scarlet fever in schools, nurseries and other childcare settings.

Documents

Guidelines for the public health management of scarlet fever outbreaks in schools, nurseries and other childcare settings

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Details

These guidelines were first developed by the national incident management team (IMT) in response to the upsurge in scarlet fever in April 2014 and subsequently updated by a subgroup of the IMT in 2016 and 2017 to reflect the changing epidemiology, evidence and feedback on implementation in practice.

A set of scarlet fever FAQs - intended for health professionals to give to the public - are available at: Scarlet fever: symptoms, diagnosis, treatment.

The previous version of this publication can be found on the UK Government Web Archive:

Published 16 April 2014
Last updated 13 October 2022 + show all updates
  1. Guidance revised to update epidemiology, research studies and provide additional template letters and checklist for HPT staff.

  2. Link to the "SF symptoms, diagnosis and treatment" document (where relevant FAQs are to be found) added to the "detail" text

  3. Guidance revised to reflect the changing epidemiology, evidence and feedback on implementation in practice.

  4. First published.