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Dr Nicholas Embleton, a leading neonatal consultant at Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said Britain was not doing enough to help prevent the disease.

He told the Today programme: "Screening policies do seem to be more effective than the current risk factor approach [in Britain] whereby we identify women with specific risk factors like premature labour.

"The problem is that you're going to identify some 300- 1000 people who could be struck at some point during the pregnancy, which means exposing an awful lot of women to antibiotics.

"The danger of that is you may risk allergic reactions in the mother, developing bacteria that are resistant to the type of antibiotics that are around, and if they baby becomes unwell with those germs that may be equally serious as group B strep."

It is unclear why the number of strep B cases have risen but doctors believe one possibility could be that as more premature babies survive, the number of susceptible infants has increased.