Meningitis: Still a health concern on college campuses

College freshmen living in dormitories are found to be at a higher risk than was initially thought.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. Aug. 27, 2001.

Washington -- More college students than ever are putting meningitis vaccinations on their "to-do" lists before heading off to the dorms.

However, there is still a great need for physicians to get the word out about the availability and effectiveness of the vaccine.

Take Georgia Southwestern State University student Evan Bozof, for instance. If he or his parents had known about the vaccine, things might be different now. Instead, he died in 1998 from a strain of bacterial meningitis that was preventable.

Since Evan's death, the situation has begun to change, with about one-quarter of all college students reporting that they have been vaccinated for meningococcal disease, according to the American College Health Assn. And at least 500 colleges are now including information about the vaccine on their precollege forms, according to a spokesman for the vaccine's manufacturer, Aventis Pasteur.

Both numbers were down around zero two years ago, before physician groups, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and college health services began focusing attention on communicating the effectiveness of the vaccine at combating what was then thought to be only a slightly higher risk of the disease among freshman dormitory residents.

"There has been a fair amount of publicity about the vaccines," said William Schaffner, MD, chair of the preventive medicine department at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn. "So increasingly, students and parents have been informed about the disease," he said. [...]