Invasive pneumococcal disease can strike at all ages but affects the young most severely, annually killing an estimated 800,000 children aged under 5 worldwide through illnesses such as pneumonia, blood infection and meningitis.
Prof Hill was born in Dunedin and is an Auckland University medical graduate.
He undertook bacterial disease research at the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council Unit in Gambia, West Africa, from 2001 to 2007, before becoming the first director of the Otago Centre for International Health in 2008.
Prof Hill had co-ordinated field work involving pneumococcal bacteria research focusing on 5000 villagers in 21 villages in rural Gambia, in association with MRC Unit colleagues.
Results of the just-published randomised controlled trial showed vaccinating young children with PCV-7 vaccine reduced carriage in the nose of the types of pneumococcal bacteria the vaccine targeted, not only in the vaccinated children, but also in vaccinated and non-vaccinated older children and adults.
Prof Hill is excited with the results.
There had previously been concerns that achieving this kind of wider "herd effect" through immunising infants against pneumococcus, the bacterium which causes the disease, would be much more difficult in Africa than elsewhere.
"We have now shown for the first time that, despite the greater prevalence of pneumococcal carriage and a high level of infection transmission compared with other parts of the world, it may be feasible to protect entire communities in Africa from pneumococcal disease through vaccinating young children alone," he said.
The study, just published in international journal PLoS Medicine, also showed that vaccinating whole communities did not result in a community-wide increase in carriage of other types of pneumococci not included in the vaccine, in the two years after vaccination.
The study was led by MRC Unit researchers in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
This unit recently received a $US7 million grant ($NZ8.8 million) over four years from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support further vaccine-effectiveness research in Gambia.
Dr Grant Mackenzie is the project's principal investigator. The research will also involve Prof Hill as a co-investigator, and some postgraduate students from the Otago centre are also likely to take part.
