NOTE: A surveillance case definition is a set of uniform criteria used to define a disease for public health surveillance. Surveillance case definitions enable public health officials to classify and count cases consistently across reporting jurisdictions. Surveillance case definitions are not intended to be used by healthcare providers for making a clinical diagnosis or determining how to meet an individual patient’s health needs.
Meningococcal disease manifests most commonly as meningitis and/or meningococcemia that may progress rapidly to purpura fulminans, shock, and death. However, other manifestations might be observed.
A clinically compatible case AND isolation of Neisseria meningitidis from a normally sterile site (e.g., blood or cerebrospinal fluid {CSF} or, less commonly, synovial, pleural, or pericardial fluid) or skin scrapings of purpuric lesions.
*Positive antigen test results from urine or serum samples are unreliable for diagnosing meningococcal disease.