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Professor Ruth Bishop has been named the 2013 CSL Florey Medallist for her discovery of the rotavirus responsible for the deaths of half a million children each year.

By their third birthday, just about every child in the world has had a rotavirus infection. Every day about 1200 children die from it; half a million children every year. Thats changing. Were fighting back thanks to a discovery made in 1973 by a quiet Melbourne researcherthis years winner of the 2013 CSL Florey Medal.

That was when Ruth Bishop, Brian Ruck, Geoffrey Davidson and Ian Holmes at the Royal Childrens Hospital and the University of Melbournes microbiology department found a virus, now known as rotavirus. Until the middle of the last decade, it put about 10,000 Australian children in hospital each year with acute gastroenteritis. In the next decade, as a direct result of their research, millions of young lives will be saved.

The discovery initiated a lifes work for Ruthunderstanding the virus, working out how it spreads and fighting back with treatments and vaccines. As a result, vaccination against gastro has been part of the National Immunisation Program for all Australian infants since July 2007. And the number of hospital admissions has dropped by more than 70 per cent.

Globally, rotavirus infection still leads to more than 450,000 child deaths each year. But thats changing too. Fifty million children in the poorest countries will be vaccinated by 2015 by GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, and their partners, supported by the Bill and Melinda 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.

Yet Ruth Bishop, a quietly-spoken Australian microbiologist now in her eighties, wont be fully satisfied until a new vaccine she helped develop becomes available. Its intended for newborns, the only time children in many developing countries are likely to be near a hospital, she says. The vaccine is currently being trialled in Indonesia and New Zealand.

For her work in saving the lives of young children worldwide and inspiring a revolution in public health, Professor Ruth Bishop has won the 2013 CSL Florey Medal, a $50,000 biennial award made by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science. The medal honours Australian researchers who have made significant achievements in biomedical science and/or in advancing human health.

The main problem with gastroenteritis is dehydration. The infection destroys mature cells lining the small intestine that absorb nutrients, fluids and electrolytes. If they cant do their job, Ruth says, you get watery diarrhoea. Children can lose up to 10 per cent of their bodyweight in fluid, and then they are in real strife.

Ruth started on the hunt for the cause of gastro when she returned to work at Melbournes Royal Childrens Hospital (RCH) in 1965 after a post-doctoral fellowship in the UK. She looked initially for a bacterium, but couldnt find any candidate that could be linked to gastroenteritis. Then, in the early 70s, she got another chance. By this stage there were hints emerging in the scientific journals that a virus may be involved.

Researchers from the RCH Department of Gastroenterology had started to study another nasty aspect of gastroenteritislong-term malnourishment and sugar intolerance. They had developed a biopsy technique for the small intestine, and were using it to examine whether it was possible to predict sugar intolerance and thus move early to treat it. Ruth realised she could put the samples they took to further use by examining them under an electron microscope.

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Saving young lives by the million