Despite the campaign, a male student last week was found to have bacterial meningitis, nearly eight months after the outbreak's first case, in which a female student returned from spring break showing symptoms. Although the previous six patients have recovered from the disease, in which bacteria cause infections that can maim or kill people within hours, the university's leaders are considering a stronger step to halt the outbreak: distributing a vaccine not approved for use in the United States.
Under New Jersey law, meningitis vaccinations are already required for almost all undergraduates at Princeton and other four-year colleges in the state. But the strain of the illness at Princeton — serogroup B — is not covered by the vaccine that is widely available in the United States and that protects against most strains of the disease.
Another vaccine, Bexsero, does, but has been approved only by authorities in Europe and Australia. In response to the Princeton outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received special permission from the Food and Drug Administration to import Bexsero. The university's trustees could decide as early as Monday whether to distribute it, Martin Mbugua, a university spokesman, said. Barbara Reynolds, a C.D.C. spokeswoman, said the vaccination would be voluntary.
Though not as contagious as the common cold or the flu, bacterial meningitis can spread through close contact among people who share drinks, utensils, cigarettes or living quarters, making college students who live in dorms especially vulnerable. Kissing or coughing can spread the disease; entering a room where there is a sick person does not.
But avoiding those who fall ill is no guarantee of safety: People often catch the disease from carriers who have the bacteria but who show no symptoms, a condition affecting as much as 25 percent of the population.
About 500 people died in the United States from bacterial meningitis each year from 2003 to 2007, the most recent data available, according to the C.D.C.'s website.
Symptoms include a headache, high fever and a stiff neck. Some students are half-jokingly passing around a common test for the illness, students said: whether your neck is too stiff for you to touch your chin to your chest.
But even as parents worry and university officials urge students to avoid unnecessary contact, because of the small number of people who have come down with the illness at Princeton, most students have felt little urgency to change their habits even though the outbreak is a common conversation topic, some students said.
"It's so at an arm's length that it's not something that's real for most people," said Emilie Burke, 20, a sophomore. But, she said, her teammates on the women's rugby team had stopped sharing water bottles, and people at her office job had begun wiping down phones between uses.
As for whether students had cut back on casual sexual encounters, Ms. Burke said, "Maybe it's something people think about during the day, but it's not something they're thinking about on a Saturday night."
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