‘It’s Everyone’s Worst Fear’: How a Small College Survived an Outbreak

About dawn one Sunday morning, a health official at a small Jesuit college in California got an alarming phone call: A student had been rushed to the hospital. The ER staff quickly suspected meningitis. And while they treated and tested for the highly contagious, often fatal disease, scores of other students were streaming into the emergency room, frightened by their own symptoms.  What spun out over the next several days included thousands of panicky students and parents, the Santa Clara University president praying with the family of a student who had slipped into a coma, a top administrator bolting to the emergency room with his own son, the fastest-ever mobilization of a vaccination clinic in the United States.