Babies to be routinely offered rotavirus vaccine from next September

A vaccine against a bug that causes diarrhoea in hundreds of thousands of babies each year is to be introduced from next September, the Department of Health has announced.

All babies will be routinely offered the vaccine against rotavirus from two months old as part of the routine immunisation programme. It is expected to cut the 14,000 hospital admissions with the highly infectious bug by 70 per cent.

Rotavirus vaccines are already used routinely in the US and many other countries.

Professor David Salisbury, director of immunisation at the health department, said: “Rotavirus spreads very easily and affects around 140,000 children every year, causing distress for them and their families. There is a way to protect children from this.”