When the first warm breezes of April blow in from Buzzard’s Bay, the South End of New Bedford, near the elbow of the Massachusetts coast as it extends eastward out to Cape Cod, changes character entirely. Not that the fast-food places, convenience stores, double-decker tenements, or boarded-up businesses transform magically into some sort of suburban Valhalla, but the change of season at least encourages people to go out on the streets and makes everything seem a little brighter.

Like many other small to mid-sized New England cities, New Bedford was once a vibrant manufacturing center. From the whaling industry of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the textile industry of the latter portion of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, the city thrived. But New Bedford, like Fall River, Taunton, Lawrence, Lowell, Nashua, New Haven, Pawtucket, and other bygone industrial cities of the northeastern United States, has been down on its luck since the exodus of manufacturing jobs to the cheaper southern states and overseas. That, coupled with the devastation wrought by the influx of heroin and then crack cocaine in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, virtually ensured the cumulative, continuous cycle of poverty that has gripped the population there ever since. Nonetheless, despite all the despair, the transition from winter to spring always brings the promise of a new beginning.

The first sign that change is afoot can be seen on the ball fields and playgrounds. Children and teenagers emerge as if responding to an unseen force. Impromptu baseball games appear, despite the nearly unusable, muddy infields and the swamp-like outfields caused by the recently melted snows and months of sun deprivation. The basketball courts, too, are beehives of activity, with groups of kids trying to make up for the time lost to the long, exhausting New England winter.

Michael Gomes, a reserve forward on the local high school basketball team, had seen little playing time during his sophomore season that ended when they lost in the first round of the state tournament in March. Although he had been good enough to make the varsity team, he knew that it would take an entire off-season of work to reach his goal of being a starter next year. It was for this reason that he decided to try to forget about the throbbing ache in his head and take advantage of the first decent day of the early spring to join a pick-up game with some of the older, neighborhood boys at the city courts.

He had awakened with a dull pain over the back of his head and neck and assumed that he had slept in an unusual position, causing muscle spasms. He took Advil, an anti-inflammatory medicine that had always worked for aches, pains, and the occasional headache he had suffered in the past. This seemed to have alleviated the pain somewhat and allowed him to sleep for a few extra hours. But he still had the headache when he woke up; he was not a kid who usually got headaches.

During the pick-up game, Michael felt cold, something distinctly unusual as he was usually too warm during games. He put on a sweatshirt even though the other players were all in either T-shirts or bare-chested. Nonetheless, the game helped him forget about his headache temporarily. He played reasonably well and felt that it was a pretty good start to what would be a busy spring and summer of playing. On the short walk home around noon, he felt the sudden urge to vomit and did so on the sidewalk; he had never done that before. The headache was back in full force, throbbing in the back of his head. The sunlight bothered his eyes and made the headache seem worse. He found it difficult to bend his neck or turn from side to side. When he got home, he went straight to his bedroom, closed the shades, turned off the lights, and tried to sleep, hoping that he would feel better after a few hours.

When his mother came home from work at 5 o’clock, she went into Michael’s room, surprised to find him asleep in his bed at this hour of the day. When she could not awaken him, only getting moans and unintelligible words in response to shaking him and shouting his name, she knew that something was wrong and called 9-1-1 for help. At the hospital’s emergency room, the nurses found Michael to have a high fever, a stiff, rigid neck, and when they removed his clothes, the doctors observed faint, purplish spots on his skin around the area of the elastic waistband of his gym shorts; a few areas on his belly looked like small bruises. He seemed to be going in and out of consciousness; when arousable, he would try to answer their questions, but for the most part his answers did not make any sense. He was becoming increasingly agitated.

Michael’s mother gave permission for them to perform a spinal tap, a test in which a needle is inserted into the space between the bones of the lower back in order to take a sample of the fluid that surrounds the spinal cord and brain. The fluid the doctors removed, normally thin and crystal clear, was cloudy, white, and thick. Michael had pyogenic meningitis, a bacterial infection that affects the tissues—the meninges—that cover the brain and spinal cord in the central nervous system. Despite the best efforts of modern medicine and powerful treatments that were brought to bear in the case of Michael Gomes, he died within 24 hours. A healthy, 16-year-old boy playing basketball with friends one day, gone the next—in the blink of an eye—another victim of a devastating disease that kills or permanently disables many thousands of individuals worldwide each year in its sporadic—episodic—form and has the potential to kill orders of magnitude more than that in its epidemic form. The disease has earned its status as one of the most dreaded contagious ­diseases of nature.