Meningitis Shots Urged for Students

All college freshmen who live in dorms should be vaccinated for meningitis, a government panel recommended Thursday.

The panel is also advising doctors to give the shot to all 11- and 12-year-old children and that it be provided to at least 4 million children eligible under the federal children’s vaccines program.

Because each dose is expected to cost about $100 and only 3,000 cases of meningococcal meningitis are reported each year, “it won’t save money,” said Mark Messonier, an economist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who helped develop a cost-effectiveness study of the plan.

“It is a strategy that will save lives,” he said.

The recommendation is an about-face from previous policy and was sparked largely by a new vaccine, Menactra. The vaccine is effective for more than eight years, while the old vaccine lasted for three to five years. The old vaccine also didn’t prevent people from being carriers of the bacteria; the new vaccine does.

The action will be welcome to parents of college students since meningitis can spread rapidly through college dorms. And it will ease the mind of Lynn Bozof of Marietta, Ga., who has been lobbying for such action.

Her 20-year-old son, Evan, died of bacterial meningitis in 1998 when he was a student at Georgia Southwestern State University. Hours after complaining of a headache, he was hospitalized. He died weeks later after suffering complications including damage to his brain, lungs and liver, and amputation of all of his limbs.

“If this were a more minor illness, no, I couldn’t justify it,” said vaccine panel member Dr. Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

“But this is such a morbid disease, it causes such disruption. Every time there is a case, communities panic, it closes schools down.”