Free Republic

... A new, casually transmittable infection — a unique strain of bacterial meningitis — has cast a pall over the gay night life and dating scene, with men wondering whether this is AIDS, circa 1981, all over again. Seven men have died in New York City, about a third of diagnosed cases, since 2010. And in the last few months, the contagion seemed to be accelerating. It has targeted gay and bisexual men, and nobody knows exactly why. The city’s best hope to curb the outbreak is to vaccinate as many at-risk men as possible, focusing on those most in...

It is a variant of a disease that can go from a fever and headache to a galloping rash and then to death within hours — so quickly that some victims have been found dead in bed before they could even get to a doctor. Over the last two years, it has appeared only among men, and they often got it, health officials say, through anonymous sexual encounters with other men found through Internet chat rooms or digital apps or at parties, making it all but impossible to trace the path of infection. It is a unique strain of bacterial...