A new vaccine is protecting newborns from rotavirus, a common cause of severe diarrhoea which kills about 500,000 children aged under five around the world each year. The lifesaving vaccine our children are being denied Nine out of 10 babies showed a strong immune response to the vaccine after receiving a first dose within days of birth and subsequent doses at two and four months. The results, from a New Zealand trial in which 95 babies were given the vaccine, are being presented at the International Rotavirus Symposium in India on Thursday. Lead researcher Julie Bines, of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne, said the results were a major step towards widespread protection against rotavirus for newborns. "The advantage of this vaccine is the birth dose, which is the earliest opportunity to provide protection to babies from severe rotavirus gastroenteritis," she said. "This world-first approach has enormous potential to reduce disease and dying in the most vulnerable children around the world." Development of the vaccine is being led by academic institutions in a bid to keep it affordable for developing countries, where most rotavirus deaths occur and current vaccines are not widely available. Australian children currently receive a rotavirus vaccine at two months, but the new vaccine has shown fewer side effects and can be given at birth, offering added protection. In Australia, before introduction of rotavirus vaccination in 2007, about 10,000 young children were hospitalised with rotavirus gastroenteritis, and one child died each year from complications. Now more than than 7000 hospital admissions are prevented each year, and children who are hospitalised are less severely affected. Professor Bines said many of the babies now hospitalised in Australia were too young to have received the current vaccine, and required treatment for dehydration. Dehydrated babies in developing countries can die without receiving the fluids they need. Professor Bines said one of the barriers to a widespread rollout of the current rotavirus vaccine in developing countries was inadequate follow-up healthcare for babies, but providing the new vaccine at birth before families returned to their communities helped overcome the problem. Researchers believe the vaccine offers some protection after a single dose, but they need to do further studies to establish how much. Trials of the new vaccine are also under way in Indonesia, where about 10,000 babies die from rotavirus gastroenteritis each year. Researchers hope the vaccine will be widely available by 2016.