On Friday, November 22, the eighth case of meningitis was reported at Princeton University. This case, like the seven previous ones confirmed at Princeton over the past nine months, was shown to be caused by a rare meningococcal bacterium known as serotype B. While this may be regarded as a small number in a campus of 5,000 undergraduate and 2,500 graduate students, what worries public health officials is that meningitis is a rare disease. Moreover, group B is particularly rare in the United States.

Meningitis is generally characterized as the inflammation of a membrane that surrounds the brain and the spinal cord…