After an upper school student contracted viral meningitis before Presidents’ week break, Harker’s Director of Health Services Debra Nott emailed upper school parents information on the illness and its vaccinations.

Contracted through viral or bacterial infection, meningitis causes the inflammation of membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord, and mainly affects young children and teenagers. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) describes common symptoms of viral meningitis as high fever, stiff neck, headaches, sensitivity to light, fatigue, nausea, loss of appetite, and vomiting. At the outset, symptoms often appear flu-like.

Viral meningitis typically develops from viruses such as enterovirus, mumps, herpes, measles and influenza.

“Viral meningitis is not very contagious, [while] bacterial meningitis can be quite contagious,” Nott said in an interview with Harker Aquila. “Viral meningitis…is not an illness in and of itself; it’s a complication of an illness. The most common virus that causes meningitis is an enterovirus.”

The upper school requires all students to be vaccinated against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, and chickenpox.

“If you are immunized against those diseases that cause viral meningitis that really decreases the chance that you will ever get viral meningitis as a complication,” Nott said.

Nott shared some advice for staying healthy.

“Since meningitis is a complication of the illness, what you want to do is not get the original illness,” Nott said. “Wash your hands, don’t put your fingers in the holes in your face because that’s how you put the virus into your upper respiratory system, eat a healthy diet, and get enough sleep at night.

The CDC recommends that children between the ages of 11 and 12 be vaccinated once with the meningococcal vaccine Menactra, with 16 year olds receiving a second dose. A quadrivalent vaccine, Menactra protects against four serogroups, or strains: A, C, W and Y. Patients between the ages of 16 to 23 can be immunized against serogroup B meningococcal disease with a new vaccine, which the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved in 2014.

According to the CDC, while both viral meningitis and bacterial meningitis include the same initial symptoms, patients with viral meningitis typically recover within 7 to 10 days after falling ill, whereas patients with bacterial meningitis often experience serious complications including brain damage, hearing loss and learning disabilities.

The viral case at the upper school follows a bacterial meningitis outbreak at Santa Clara University, where three undergraduate students contracted the B strain of the bacterium in early February. Last week, the Santa Clara Public Health Department and California Department of Public Health vaccinated a total of 4,923 students at the Santa Clara University campus against the serogroup B strain for free.

In response to the outbreak (according to the CDC,  in some areas even two cases constitute an outbreak), Rite Aid has stocked all 17 of its Santa Clara county pharmacies with the serogroup B vaccine, and other drugstores are expected to follow suit.