Rwanda plans to immunise some 395,000 infants under the age of one for pneumococcal disease by the end of 2009, under a new vaccine programme announced on Thursday by the private-public GAVI Alliance.

The disease, which can cause a range of infections from relatively mild ear infection to potentially life-threatening illnesses such as pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis, kills up to 1 million children under the age of 5 every year.

Pneumococcal disease is said to be the world's leading vaccine-preventable killer - responsible for the deaths of 1.6 million people a year, with nine in 10 cases occurring in developing countries.

Thirty-six high- and middle-income countries already provide routine childhood immunisation against the disease, but Rwanda's initiative is the first national programme to be launched in a low-income country.

Experts hope the three-dose vaccine will prevent the deaths of between 5,000 and 6,000 people a year in Rwanda, helping the central African country's efforts to meet a Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality by two-thirds by 2015.

Immunised children should also be safe from serious illnesses such as pneumococcal meningitis which can cause disability.

"It will give us one more weapon in the arsenal we have to protect our children," said Rwandan Health Minister Richard Sezibera, who will lead a group of doctors and nurses in administering the first doses in a rural clinic east of the capital Kigali on Saturday.

"We are committed to saving the lives and improving the health of our most precious national resource - our children. With the introduction of this vaccine, our goal of significantly reducing child death in Rwanda will now be within reach."

GAVI, whose partners include governments, drugmakers, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, plans to launch a similar immunisation programme in Gambia later this year.

U.S. pharmaceuticals company Wyeth said it was donating 3 million pneumococcal vaccines to the immunisation programmes in Rwanda and Gambia. Officials gave no figure for the total cost of the donation.

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