“MENINGITIS is not going away.”

That was the warning from Scottie Kern during Meningitis Awareness Week.

The death of his 11 month-son to the infection heralded the start of his fight to help eradicate meningitis and septicaemia and ensure other parents never experienced the same loss he did.

Despite improvements and the development of vaccines over the years, more remains to be done to prevent young deaths and make sure the symptoms are widely known and picked up swiftly not only by parents but by the medical profession as a whole, he said.

“My goal is to make sure people are aware that this meningitis thing is not going away,” he said. “We have made progress in terms of vaccines but it still takes an awful lot of lives every year. There is more work to be done to cover all the strains of meningitis.”

The week comes as a student at New College, Swindon, recovers at Great Western Hospital after contracting bacterial meningitis.

And Scottie said students were an at-risk group.

“I feel compelled to be part of this awareness week; especially at this particular time of year when kids start university or college and come together,” he said.

“There is often a spike in meningitis at this time of year.”

Scottie’s son, Cailan, died within 24 hours of being diagnosed with pneumococcal meningitis and septicaemia in 2009.

In a sad twist of fate, the father-of-three from Oakhurst, had spent five years working on the clinical trials for an inoculation that could have saved his son’s life.

But the jab was only made available a year later.

“The most frustrating element to Cailan’s story is that I was working for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and worked extensively with the Vaccines Research unit on Prevenar 13,” he said.

“Cailan had been fully vaccinated in accordance with the national schedule of that time, but if Prevenar 13 had been approved less than a year earlier, Cailan would still be alive.”

In 2011, the 42-year-old embarked on a campaign to lobby the Government into approving a new jab against meningitis in the childhood immunisation schedule.

Again, Scottie played a heavy role in the development of the new vaccine, as a consultant to the firm working on the Bexsero jab.

In March, it was announced Bexsero would be included in the immunisations schedule if it could be secured at a reasonable price for the NHS. Health chiefs are still negotiating and so far no final decision has been made.

Scottie has now joined charity Meningitis Research Foundation in urging under-25s to get a booster jab of the MenC vaccine as soon as possible.

Meningitis and septicaemia affect approximately nine people in the UK and Ireland every day.

They are deadly diseases that can strike without warning, killing one in ten, and leaving a quarter of survivors with life altering after-effects ranging from deafness and brain damage to loss of limbs.

As part of MenC booster campaign, GPs will administer the vaccine free of charge until October 31.