Concerns about meningitis have risen to new heights after the sixth young adult in Wisconsin, four of which were UW System students, was diagnosed in the span of three weeks. Two have died.
UW-Eau Claire sophomore Sean Coleman fell victim to the disease April 21 after exhibiting severe and sudden symptoms.
At UW-Madison, a freshman who resides in Sellery Hall and another unidentified resident of Ogg Hall became ill with different strains of the disease last week. Both patients have since been released from the hospital.
UW-Whitewater has also seen two students hospitalized in the past week, Bradley Buchholz and Emily Krukar. Bucholz has since been released from University Hospital and Krukar is now in fair condition.
“She’s doing well,” said Brian Mattmiller, UW-Whitewater’s director of news and public affairs.
Meningitis is a rare yet serious disease causing inflammation of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord.
It can be caused by either a viral or bacterial infection. All of the recent cases have been bacterial.
The most common bacterial form of the disease is meningococcal meningitis, which is caused by the bacterium Neisseria meningitis.
Director of University Health Services Scott Spear said meningococcal meningitis often has more serious consequences than the other forms of the disease.
“It is important to keep in mind that this is a rare disease; however, for those who contract the disease, it can be devastating or even fatal,” Spear said. “The disease can result in permanent brain damage, hearing loss, learning disability, limb amputation, kidney failure or death.”
Each year about 3,000 Americans contract the disease with 5 to 10 percent of the cases resulting in death.
Though it is important to seek treatment early, experts say the deceptive symptoms of this rare disease may cause a delay in consulting a physician.
According to the Center for Disease Control, symptoms commonly involve a fever of more than 101 degrees, severe headache and a stiff neck. Other symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, discomfort while looking into bright lights and a rash.
“Know the signs and symptoms. Symptoms get worse very quickly, and sometimes if you have a tough case of the flu it’s hard to make that determination,” said Thomas Haupt, communicable disease epidemiologist for the Wisconsin division of public health. “When in doubt, you certainly can see your physician.”
Haupt said the patient and doctor must decide together how to proceed because diagnosis involves an invasive procedure that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
The only way to verify if someone has bacterial meningitis is to do a spinal tap, in which a needle is used to draw fluid from the spinal canal at the lower back.
If bacteria are present, antibiotics can often be used to effectively clear up an infection.
People exposed to the bacteria are often given preventative antibiotics, though meningitis is only spread through direct contact with saliva and other secretions, not general contact.
“What we have done in response is our normal response for cases of meningococcal disease and that is making sure those with close, intimate contact with those who have exchanged saliva do receive the prophylactic antibiotics,” Haupt said. “We feel very confident that all the people who did have intimate contact have received the antibiotics.”
The meningococcal bacteria is carried in the nose and throat of five to ten percent of the population, but the vast majority never get sick, Spear said.
“This low occurrence of illness after exposure suggests that an individual’s health status, rather than bacterial factors, plays an important role in determining who may get sick,” Spear explained.
College students are three times more likely to contract meningitis than the general population. This is partly due to their lifestyle, Spear said.
“Recent studies have shown that the college-age population, [ages 18-24] particularly freshmen who live in dorm residences, are at a slightly higher risk of [contracting] meningococcal meningitis,” Spear said. “These same studies link student behavior and lifestyle to the risk. Some of the behaviors include binge-drinking, patronizing bars and smoking.”
Students concerned with the risk of infection can get a vaccination that protects against four of the five types of meningococcal disease.
In 1999, the Center for Disease Control started recommending college freshmen receive the vaccine because they were at an increased risk for contracting the disease.
“[Health services] should be recommending it, and obviously based on what’s been happening they will probably be pushing it more,” Haupt said. “Again we are telling them to vaccinate based on the recommendations from CDC and not based it on any kind of outbreak situation, because we do not have an outbreak situation and we are trying to make that very clear to people.”
An outbreak is defined as three or more cases of the same type of bacteria in a defined geographical area within a three-month period.
Haupt said DNA fingerprinting tests received from five of the cases showed none of the cases were related. The sixth case is still pending.
Though there have been so many cases in such a short period of time, Haupt said this is not a rare event.
“This is uncommon, but I won’t say it’s rare to have this many in this age group in such a short period of time,” Haupt said. “It’s not common, but it’s happened before.”
It’s important to be aware of the situation and conscience of the signs and symptoms, but it is not a situation to panic about said Haupt.
“There are a lot of rumors going around and every day it’s something different, and unfortunately right now that’s half the job,” Haupt said. “The big thing I can tell you is to tell people not to panic — we are not in an outbreak situation.”
Amid the recent popcorn-like incidences of meningitis in its various forms on campuses across the state, levels of student awareness have been heightened and the balancing act between individual privacy and public-health concerns is a delicate balance for university officials.
In response to the meningococcal meningitis case in Sellery hall two weeks ago, UW-Madison officials only contacted residents of the hall where the patient lived and specifically targeted presentations and counseling to the fifth floor, on which the victim lives. No official communication was forwarded to the larger university community.
“We don’t feel like we want to unnecessarily upset 40,000 students when the number of students who would be anywhere in contact with the particular student would be a much smaller number,” UW spokesman John Lucas said. “So we don’t get parents up in arms, e-mailing and calling if their student is in danger or whatnot. We like to specify the hall.”
UW-Whitewater, which has seen two cases of meningitis on its campus in the past two weeks, took a different approach to informing the community.
“We sent a broadcast e-mail to the entire campus — not only to all students, but also the faculty and staff,” said Mattmiller, via telephone from Whitewater. “We did include the student’s name in the internal release, which was more directed towards ‘here is what you need to do, here is the steps you need to take’ than the external news release for the community.”
He said Whitewater’s efforts extend beyond e-mails and house meetings.
“One of the first actions that was taken [was] to have members of residence life go door to door and notify all residents in the hall that we had a confirmed case,” Mattmiller said. “We included a statement that spelled out additional medical information about bacterial meningitis.”
Lucas said UW-Madison tends to take a more cautious approach to dispersing public information regarding any illness acquired by students, even communicable diseases.
“We like to get out as much as we know and get good information into people’s hands,” he said. “Some people at [University Health Services] tend to think of it more as a personal health crisis, in the same way that we wouldn’t write a press release about a student that had liver failure.”
Lucas said the decisions regarding which information to release are coordinated heavily through University Health officials. Lucas also said the university tries to balance patient confidentiality with getting “good health information out there, which is why we try to limit year, student’s name, etc.”
Spear said UHS attempts to get information in the hands of those who need it, but that many cases of meningitis do not pose the significant public-health threat their persistent news coverage may imply.
“[It is] not an easily transmitted infection. Students do not need to panic unless they shared secretions, what we usually refer to as swapping spit,” Spear said. “Why other colleges do what they did, I can’t speak to. But from a public-health standpoint, it isn’t really necessary unless you have three or more cases of the same strain in the same area.”
