{"id":3506,"date":"2013-10-28T06:27:03","date_gmt":"2013-10-27T19:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/?p=3506"},"modified":"2015-04-29T12:08:02","modified_gmt":"2015-04-29T02:08:02","slug":"professor-ruth-bishop-wins-national-honour-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/professor-ruth-bishop-wins-national-honour-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Ruth Bishop wins national honour"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ruth<\/a>Thanks to the work of\u00a0Professor Ruth Bishop<\/a>\u00a010,000 Australian children won’t need to go to hospital this year and half a million young lives could be saved worldwide every year.<\/p>\n

Today Ruth was awarded the\u00a02013 CSL Florey Medal<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0her work, which has inspired a revolution in public health.\u00a0The CSL Florey Medal honours Australian researchers who have made significant achievements in biomedical science and\/or in advancing human health.<\/p>\n

In 1973 Ruth, along with Brian Ruck, Geoffrey Davidson and Ian Holmes from The Royal Children\u2019s Hospital (RCH) and the University of Melbourne\u2019s\u00a0microbiology department<\/a>\u00a0found a virus, now known as rotavirus. They showed it was the cause of an acute\u00a0gastroenteritis<\/a>\u00a0that was hospitalising 10,000 Australian children every year and killing more than half a million children worldwide.<\/p>\n

The discovery initiated a life\u2019s work for Ruth – understanding the virus, working out how it spreads and fighting back with treatments and vaccines, advising the\u00a0World Health Organization<\/a>\u00a0(WHO) and the\u00a0Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation<\/a>. As a result, vaccination against ‘gastro’ has been part of the\u00a0National Immunisation Program<\/a>\u00a0for all Australian infants since July 2007. And the number of hospital admissions has dropped by more than 70 per cent.<\/p>\n

By 2015, 50 million children in the poorest countries will be vaccinated by the\u00a0Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation<\/a>\u00a0(GAVI), and their partners, supported by the Gates Foundation. Figures available from Bolivia, the first low-income country to take part in the program, show a drop of about three-quarters of all hospitalisations.<\/p>\n

Ruth is now in her eighties, and is an Esteemed Honorary Fellow at the\u00a0Murdoch Childrens Research Institute<\/a>\u00a0and says she won\u2019t be fully satisfied until a new vaccine they\u2019re developing for becomes available. The vaccine is intended for newborns, which is vital because it’s \u201cthe only time children in many developing countries are likely to be near a hospital,\u201d Ruth says. The vaccine is currently being trialled in Indonesia and New Zealand.<\/p>\n

In winning the CSL Florey Medal, Ruth joins an\u00a0elite bunch<\/a>\u00a0of Australian medical researchers including\u00a0Ian Frazer, Barry Marshall and Graeme Clark. We congratulate Ruth on her leading, dedicated and inspiring work, improving the health and saving the lives of so many children across the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to the work of Professor Ruth Bishop 10,000 Australian children won’t need to go to hospital this year and half a million young lives could be saved worldwide every year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3506"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3510,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506\/revisions\/3510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}