Meningitis and the clinical syndrome of acute meningococcemia are well-described sequelae from infections caused by Neisseria meningitidis. Within the realm of this syndrome, secondary sites of infection are not uncommon. There is a concomitant septic arthritis in 11% of cases of meningococcemia. We describe below the rare clinical scenario of a 29-year-old woman with primary meningococcal arth...

IMPORTANCE Although chronic meningococcemia is an uncommon disorder, it is of great importance to clinicians across multiple disciplines because it presents similarly to reactive, neoplastic, or rheumatic disorders. Ruling out chronic meningococcemia, however, represents a diagnostic challenge because routine microbiological investigations frequently fail to identify Neisseria meningitidis. Alt...

Meningococcal disease is a serious life-threatening bacterial infection caused by Neisseria meningitides with its most common clinical presentations: meningococcal meningitis (which has high morbidity and low mortality) and meningococcemia or Meningococcal septicemia (which has low morbidity and high mortality). Globally, Neisseria meningitidis causes meningitis in about 47.3% of cases and Meni...

A 31-year-old woman without history of systemic diseases presented to the emergency department with spiking fever, chills, generalized myalgia, severe epigastralgia, and watery diarrhea for 1 day. Flulike symptoms had been noted for several days. Progressive extension of petechiae skin purpura (Fig. 1) developed within 2–3 h upon arrival at the hospital. Low blood pressure persisted despite vig...

From the Cardiovascular and Infectious Disease Divisions, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. This work was supported in part by Grant 5432 HL-07049 from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Bethesda, Maryland. Requests for reprints shuld be addressed to Dr. James M. Kirshenbaum, Cardiovascular Division, Brigham and W...

We mainly refer to the acute setting of meningococcemia. Meningococcemia is an infection caused by Neisseria meningitidis, which has 13 clinically significant serogroups that are distinguishable by the structure of their capsular polysaccharides. N. meningitidis, also called meningococcus, is a Gram-negative, aerobic, diplococcus bacterium. The various consequences of severe meningococcal sepsi...