Dive Brief:

• Ohio University has settled a lawsuit that blamed the school for negligence and bad health care in the death of a freshman in 2010.
• The university will pay $1 million to the parents of Andrea Robinson, who died of bacterial meningitis.
• Ohio University’s insurer will foot the bill for $900,000 of the settlement, with the school paying $100,000, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

Dive Insight:

The lawsuit claimed that university officials knew about other cases of bacterial meningitis on campus for more than a year, but they didn’t inform Robinson and other students about the cases and they provided faulty information about warning signs of the sickness. The school’s Hudson Health Center misdiagnosed Robinson’s sickness, whose symptoms included a fever of nearly 104 degrees, and advised her to take Tylenol, drink fluids and get rest, according to the lawsuit. An outbreak was declared for the Athens, Ohio, campus after Robinson and six other students contracted the disease in 2009 and 2010. The settlement allows the university to make no admission of liability or wrongdoing. Originally, the university claimed that Robinson’s own negligence was the cause of sickness and death.