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Mildred Iro, a Paediatric Research Fellow working with the Oxford Vaccine Group, won the Lorber Prize for the best paediatric publication of 2017 for her work on childhood encephalitis admissions.

Mildred Iro

The winning paper, published in Lancet in April 2017, examined trends in hospital admission rates for encephalitis in children over a 33-year period (1979-2011). The results show that while hospital admission rates for all instances of childhood encephalitis in England increased between 1995 and 2011, admissions for mumps encephalitis decreased by 98%, and for measles by 97%, after the introduction of the two-dose MMR vaccination schedule. Mildred’s study is the first to quantify the effect of the MMR vaccine on childhood measles and mumps encephalitis admissions in England. It is also the first to define the incidence of all-cause childhood encephalitis in England.

Mildred Iro joined Oxford University’s Department of Paediatrics in 2012; in 2013 she commenced her DPhil at the Oxford Vaccine Group. She has done most of her paediatric training in Southampton, where she is planning to return after the completion of her doctorate to take up the position of an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in Child Health and Genomics.

The Lorber Prize is given annually by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. The award honours a pre-consultant grade medical practitioner working in the UK for the best scientific paper related to paediatrics.