FRIDAY, March 15, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Hundreds of students at Dartmouth and Princeton are having trouble opening their reddened eyes, but it has nothing to do with cramming for their finals.
The two Ivy League schools have been swamped with cases of the benign infection known as pink eye, or conjunctivitis.
More than 500 students at Dartmouth's campus in Hanover, N.H., are believed to have contracted the illness since January, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, almost 250 students at Princeton, in New Jersey, have come down with it, said school spokeswoman Marilyn Marks.
Pink eye, or inflammation of tissue called the conjunctiva, can be caused by bacteria or viruses. But health officials have identified the source of the Dartmouth outbreak as Streptococcus pneumoniae, a respiratory bacteria that can lead to far more serious diseases. Eye cultures from 12 consecutive students there turned up the bug in all samples.
Bacterial pink eye can be treated with antibiotics, which aren't effective against viruses.
Princeton this week issued an alert to its students warning them about the crusty-eye infection and how to avoid it. Conjunctivitis is generally spread by close person-to-person contact, as well as sharing glasses, towels, or other objects. Strep passes through respiratory secretions, like cough droplets.
The source of the Princeton outbreak hasn't been determined, although at least one culture has been confirmed as Streptococcus pneumoniae, Marks said. Dr. Michael Martin, a medical detective at the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases, said it's not clear yet if the two spikes are indeed related. "If it was the same bacteria, it would be interesting and a bit of a surprise," he said.
The CDC issued a report on the Dartmouth outbreak. As of March 7, 493 Dartmouth students, or almost 10 percent of the student body, had probably developed pink eye this year -- a number that has continued to rise throughout the month. The cases were clustered almost entirely among undergraduates, and particularly among freshmen and sophomores, reflecting the high degree of contact among these students.
Martin said the infection doesn't appear to have spread to day care centers and other facilities beyond campus.
While investigators searched for a "point source" for the Hanover outbreak, Martin said a single occasion -- such as the school's Winter Carnival -- doesn't appear to have been the spark.
"It would have been great if we had been able to nail it down to one particular event," he said.
Dartmouth is entering its spring break period, and while the outbreak appears to have tapered off, the school continues to see new cases of conjunctivitis. That raises the prospect that some will carry the infection to their holiday destinations, which often include warm states like Florida where other students cluster.
Have other Ivy League schools have already caught the bug?
Sharon Dittman, a spokeswoman for the Cornell University student health service, said the Ithaca, N.Y., campus has seen a "moderate increase" this winter in pink eye. "We have treated people very successfully with antibiotic drops," she added.
Dittman said Cornell was not looking into whether the increase in cases was related to the outbreaks at Princeton and Dartmouth.
And over at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Dr. Evelyn Weiner, director of the Student Health Service, said, "It's not a story for us."
Weiner said her campus had seen about 100 cases of conjunctivitis in the last two months, which she termed "no appreciable change" over last year at the same time.
What To Do: For more on conjunctivitis, try the University of Toronto or KidsHealth.
