SEATTLE — Carl Buher was a 14-year-old in Mount Vernon, Wash., in 2003, when the high school freshman was hit with a sudden illness: high fever, pounding headache, disorientation and purple splotches over his face and arms.

Within a day, he’d been diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, a rare and fast-moving infection, and flown by helicopter to Seattle Children’s Hospital for lifesaving antibiotics. Within weeks, he was sent to the intensive-care unit at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Within months, he had lost three fingers and both legs below the knee, amputations forced by the ravages of the disease.

A dozen years later, Buher is a 26-year-old Seattle civil engineer. He’s also a vocal advocate for a vaccine that could have prevented his infection in the first place.

“When I got sick, none of us had ever heard of meningitis before,” said Buher, who testified last winter before a panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “People don’t know there’s a vaccine and that they should be vaccinating their kids.”

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which sets U.S. standards, is expected to decide whether a new vaccine to prevent meningitis strain B — the type Buher contracted — should get the nod for widespread use.

The question is whether the meningitis B vaccines used to halt recent college campus outbreaks in New Jersey, California and Oregon will be included among routinely recommended shots — as vaccines that target four other types of meningitis already are.

Bacterial meningitis is an infection that attacks the linings of the brain and spinal cord. It’s spread by close contact through respiratory secretions, such as kissing or sharing drinking glasses, which puts teens and young adults particularly at risk.

“We support the most broad-scale recommendations that the committee can do,” Buher said.

An estimated 30 to 40 infections and three to four deaths each year could be prevented if the panel were to vote for routine meningitis B vaccinations, surveillance data suggest.

But insiders say concerns about the relatively small number of young people affected by meningitis B infections — 50 to 60 cases a year — as well as questions about the lasting effectiveness of the vaccine, potential problems with delivering it and overall costs — could steer the committee toward a ruling that stops short of a wide advisory.

Instead, the group could recommend a “permissive” vaccination, said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and the chief of the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. That would allow doctors to deliver it and insurance companies to pay for it, but wouldn’t place it on the list of must-have shots on which parents rely.

But to Buher and others, including the National Meningitis Association, it’s far less than they’ve been demanding.

Lynn Bozof, president of the association, lost her 20-year-old son, Evan, to meningitis in 1998. At that time, a vaccine to prevent the infection was used to protect U.S. military recruits, but wasn’t approved in the wider population.

“There was a vaccine available, and we didn’t know about it,” the Georgia mother said.