The U.S. Postal Service has settled a lawsuit with an Aptos family who claimed the agency mishandled a laboratory shipment of meningitis that ended up in their daughter’s clothing.Although no member of the family contracted the disease, they had to take antibiotics that made them ill, according to suit filed last September in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The suit was settled Wednesday for an undisclosed sum.The mixup apparently occurred in February 2001 when the San Mateo County Health Department sent a cylinder of meningitis samples to a Berkeley lab. That package and one sent home by the Aptos family’s daughter returning from college were somehow damaged and repackaged - together - by postal employees.A spokesman for the Postal Service refused to comment on the settlement.
