Meningococcal Outbreak at UCSB
An Update from Public Health
Greetings from the front lines of Disease Control. It’s been a little busy over here.
For the past month, I’ve been overseeing the Public Health Department’s coordinated response to the outbreak of meningococcal disease at UC Santa Barbara. I want to give our community a personal update on the latest developments, in an effort to stay transparent and direct with the public we serve.
For those of you playing catch-up on the details of this outbreak, let me give you a quick summary. Four cases of invasive meningococcal disease have been confirmed in UCSB undergraduate students between November 11 and November 21, 2013. All of these students were active in campus organizations and lived in different group-housing units. Three have fully recovered, and one sustained permanent disability and is still hospitalized. All four cases are serogroup B, which is not covered by the meningococcal vaccine routinely used in the United States. We know for sure that the UCSB outbreak is not related to the Princeton University outbreak, despite the fact that both are serogroup B. (A very specific “DNA fingerprint” test showed that the UCSB outbreak is serogroup B strain ST32, and the Princeton outbreak is serogroup B strain ST409.)
