A student whose name was being withheld entered the hospital late Tuesday or early yesterday. The student was the second in two days to be hospitalized with viral meningitis, said Tom Oswald of the Michigan State News Bureau.
On Tuesday, Michigan State officials met with students to discuss the case of the student hospitalized Monday. That student is doing well, said Dr. Dean Sienko, the Ingham County medical examiner.
The four cases do not represent an epidemic, health officials say.
Dr. Dennis Jurczak, director of the campus Olin Health Center, said during Tuesday's meeting that the university realizes the reports are raising concerns.
"We have a lot of worried students and parents," he said. "This whole situation is unusual."
State health officials confirmed yesterday that the two cases of viral meningitis are no cause for alarm.
Dr. William Hall of the state Department of Community Health said that viral meningitis is a fairly common illness that sometimes is so mild people don't even go to the doctor.
About 500 to 1,000 cases of viral meningitis get reported to the state each year, "but there's probably about 10 times that many that actually occur," said Hall, chief of the communicable disease epidemiology division.
The far more serious bacterial meningitis occurs less often, he said. The state each year receives only about 50 to 100 reports of meningococcal meningitis, a bacterial strain that caused the death of two Michigan State students, one in December and one in February.
While it is rare to have two cases of meningococcal meningitis, the strains that killed the students were different organisms and the cases were unconnected.
Meningococcal meningitis is one of about a hundred different kinds of bacterial meningitis. Despite the two students' deaths, "there's no unusual risk for acquiring it" at Michigan State, he said.
Far more people are likely to get viral meningitis, but only because it's a more common disease, he said.
Both the viral and bacterial forms are transmitted through intimate contact, such as kissing or drinking from the same glass. That means campus visitors and students who have had casual contact with meningitis patients are in no danger, university officials said.
Hall concurred. Viral meningitis "is not something that, for practical purposes, is spread between people," he said.
The Dec. 5 death of Jeffrey Paga, a junior from Dryden studying pre-law and finance, raised concerns at Michigan State. Those worries grew when Brian Anderson, a junior from Columbiaville majoring in landscape architecture, died Feb. 10.
The death of a third student Sunday remained under investigation. Sophomore journalism major Christina Georgeoff, 19, of Grand Blanc, was treated for meningitis in 1995. But meningitis probably was not a factor in her death, Sienko said.
Still, the cases have raised concern on campus.
"Everybody is scared and everybody is talking about it," sophomore Stephan Trouten told the Lansing State Journal in a report published Wednesday. "People keep saying, what if I had a class with him? Am I going to die?"
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three cases of the same type of meningitis over a period of nearly three months could constitute an epidemic.
But there is no epidemic at Michigan State because the three of the four cases over that same time span involved different types of the disease, Sienko said.
Meningococcus is a bacteria that can lead to meningitis - inflammation of the lining surrounding the brain and spinal cord - and meningococcemia, a disease caused by bacteria in the bloodstream.