They had heard about several cases of meningitis on campus, but she reminded her father that she was vaccinated against the disease so he didn’t have to worry, ONN’s Cristin Severance reported on Wednesday.
“I talked to her at the end of the day Monday and I said ‘How are you feeling?'” Joe Robinson said. “She said that she was feeling a lot better and that her fever broke. She said that she was just going to lay down for a nap. Those were the last words I spoke to her, ever.”
Andrea Robinson had contracted the “B-Strain” of bacterial Meningitis, which is a strain with no vaccine.
Joe Robinson said that all the warnings from Ohio University about the disease never mentioned the fact there was no vaccine.
“We were told to get these kids vaccinated,” Joe Robinson said. “Every time one of these alerts came out that there is Bacterial Meningitis at OU, it said to get your kids vaccinated. That’s what we were told, which did not give myself the comfort, but the kids comfort. They thought we are protected, we were vaccinated.”
Joe Robinson said a week after his daughter’s death was the first time the university sent an alert warning about the B-strain.
“Right at the time that Andrea passed, the dean of the school reassured me that they were going to do everything they could to get to this,” Joe Robinson said.
He said that he never heard from Ryan Lombardi, dean of students, or anyone from the school again.
Then at the end of October, the family received a letter.
It was addressed to Robinson asking her why she hadn’t returned to OU and wanting her to fill out a brief survey.
“This just goes to show you, the impersonal attitude that they have towards the kids at the school, and the families,” Joe Robinson said. “I mean, what more extreme can you have? You lost a kid at your school and nine months later you don’t even remember why they left your school?”
He said that he fired off a letter back to the school sharing his frustrations ( click here to read both letters ). He didn’t even want a reply and said he would have never even talked publicly about these issues, until now.
“The letter just said to me, that they didn’t care or they are incompetent,” Joe Robinson said. “To me those are the same answers on why we weren’t told about the B-strain. Either they don’t care or they are incompetent. Neither one of those are a good answer for an education system.”
Now, all he wants is the college to educate not just about the disease, but about the strain that killed his daughter.
Source: newsnet5.com, 18 November 2010.
