Bacterial meningitis is an infectious disease that proliferates rapidly. It is a communicable disease that badly affects the resistance potential of individuals who live in close communities. Due to non-identification of close contacts of patients of meningitis for prophylaxis/vaccination until it is too late, the scourge has been able to affect large sections of the population.
It is a rapidly progressive outbreak of illness that involves substantial morbidity and mortality. It gives rise to considerable social and economic stresses in such communities. The cost of relieving such stresses developed on the massive scale definitely is not for individuals to be able to meet.
All these are the factors in the US at least that requires an adequate public health response to reduce the impact that bacterial meningitis has on people's lives. Meningitis generally occurs as an outbreak and therefore can affect significant numbers of the population.
Most people seem to have traditionally very little awareness about the illness. This last may be changing now with the US federal government recently launching a mass education campaign about the danger from meningitis.
The scourge of bacterial meningitis is such that it causes parents to consider withdrawing their children from schools in which even a single case of meningitis death occurs. It provokes a bout of mass fear and isolation of affected children. It is enough to create a rift between people.
Another reason that the illness requires a public health response is because of its symptoms that can cause confusion of wrong diagnosis in the minds of even experienced doctors. Some doctors have had their reputations tarnished because they had misdiagnosed meningitis as flu.
The penalty for that was the the death of patients within a few hours of that. Malpractice cases have been even launched against some doctors that have culminated in the doctors concerned having had to pay massive amounts of money to the family members of dead patients.
Meningitis symptoms are quite similar to that of flu and very little separates the two of them for doctors to reach a correct diagnosis. The only difference is that the health of meningitis patients deteriorates very rapidly after onset, whereas the symptoms due to flu remain fairly stable over a larger period of time, without any deterioration.
Most people forget or ignore taking a meningitis patient to a qualified doctor in time, because they are just not aware of its dangers. Usually the patient is brought to a doctor's notice when it is almost often too late.
Even when the doctor correctly has diagnosed the illness, some family members are rather tardy in administering the prescribed medication in time. The reason is that they simply take the illness as being devoid of any fatal implications.
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