By Cate Schiff
Staff Writer
Many students at Mira Costa raise awareness for groups and charities that have not impacted them as individuals. However junior Jenna Mangiagli, is raising awareness for a serious illness not many people have heard of and that has affected her personally.
Meningococcal Meningitis is an illness where membranes cover the spinal cord leading to a high fever, headache, rashes, and can lead to death. In the beginning, 5% to 10% of people that have Meningococcal, don’t feel any symptoms, another reason Mangiagli wants to spread awareness.
“I want to bring awareness to Mira Costa because Meningococcal is an unknown disease to many and it can mostly affect individuals in high school and college,” Mangiagli said.
Mangiagli is also spreading awareness because she has gone through Meningococcal herself, and knows how life threatening this disease can be. She hopes she can encourage people to get vaccinated so this doesn’t happen to them.
“I know about Meningococcal because I had it when I was two years old where I was in the hospital in intensive care for three weeks,” Mangiagli said.
Mangiagli began raising awareness for Meningococcal this year in her club. Mangiagli is co-president in the Italian Heritage Club at Mira Costa, and first presented her idea of raising awareness of Meningococcal there.
“I had a speaker come to our club to share a first hand experience with the hardships of the disease with her son,” Mangiagli said. “We wanted to get the message across to as many people as we could to make it big enough to catch interest for an assembly.”
From there, the idea flowered into a determination to get an assembly here at Mira Costa that would detail the life threatening Meningococcal. Mangiagli’s hopes to educate and inform Costa students about this devastating disease.
“Our goal for the assembly was fulfilled and Vice Principal, Jaime Mancilla, was the one who encouraged me to present the idea to PACE,” Mangiagli said. “PACE liked the idea enough to spread Meningococcal awareness to our whole school.”
With successfully grabbing PACE’s attention, Mangiagli is starting to organize the assembly, waiting to set a date, and is in the process of finding multiple speakers.
“The speaker at the assembly is still up in the air,” Mangiagli said. “We would like it to be Robin Holland to come back who came the first time to Italian Heritage Club, however, I’m still in the process to have more survivors or people that had a family member who had the disease come.”
Mangiagli hopes the information at that will be presented at the assembly will be passed around by word of mouth, encouraging people to get vaccinated for this disease.
“Many people think that Meningococcal is not that serious because they don’t even know what it is,” Mangiagli said. “By hearing personal stories of what these families had to go through, we hope that people at Mira Costa will not second guess whether or not they should be vaccinated.”
Emma Zimmerman, a sophomore and member of Italian Heritage Club, believes that Meningococcal is a topic that needs to be seriously discussed.
“I think that this is really important topic that not many people are aware of because it is not publically talked about,” Zimmerman said. “So for it to be an assembly at Costa, the message and information would be helpful to know about.”
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