CDC Backs New Meningitis Shot for Kids

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics on Thursday recommended that more than 8 million U.S. children — 11- to 12-year-olds, students entering high school and college freshmen headed for dorm life — get a new meningitis vaccination.

'This is a very bad disease,' said the academy's Dr. Carol J. Baker, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. 'It's very rapidly progressive in adolescence. You can have an adolescent in a shopping mall at 2 in the afternoon, in the emergency room at 6 in the evening, and death by midnight.'

That comment is pretty typical of the way parents are to be scared into vaccinating millions of children against a disease which is terminal in around 750 persons per annum -mostly because of lack of awareness of symptoms and failure to act immediately.