A health authority has been forced to overturn existing guidelines and offer a mass immunisation programme after worried parents refused to send their children to classes following the death of a teenage student from meningitis.

Hundreds of pupils at Cwmcarn high school near Newport, south Wales, have been kept off school since last week.

Under national guidelines mass vaccinations do not normally take place unless two or more cases of the same strain of meningitis are reported within a certain period.

Following the death of Ashley Burnett, 14, from the C strain of the illness early last week, close family and contacts were offered jabs. But Cwmcarn parents have been insisting that all children at the 680 pupil school be vaccinated.

Pupils aged 15 to 17 were vaccinated last autumn as part of the nationwide immunisation programme aimed at protecting high risk groups.

More than a third of the school was absent again yesterday as Gwent health authority and national assembly health officials held a crisis meeting.

The decision to extend the vaccination programme to younger pupils came as it emerged that a seven-month- old baby had been admitted to hospital with meningococcal septicaemia in what could be a related case. Although it has not yet been established what strain of meningitis the baby is suffering from, it is understood that a friend of Ashley recently babysat for the family.

Don Touhig, MP for Islwyn, said the health authority's decision was a victory for common sense.

"Parents will be pleased we have got a positive reponse," he said last night before a public meeting at Cwmcarn rugby club to explain the outcome of negotiations.

The vaccination programme is to begin on Thursday, the day after Ashley's funeral.

Cwmcarn's headteacher, Bill Beales, said 450 of the school's pupils failed to turn up for lessons on Friday and almost 300 were still absent yesterday.

He said a public meeting called by the health authority last week following Ashley's death had failed to allay fears and had led to some parents fighting their corner more vehemently.

"The tragic loss of any child is bound to trigger off highly charged emotional feelings," he said. "Things have calmed down a bit now, but there is a strong and vocal parental group that won't be satisfied unless they have their children vaccinated".

Gwent health authority insisted that the proposed immunisation against meningitis C was not an emergency vaccination but a rescheduling of a programme under which 11- to 14-year-olds were due to be vaccinated in the spring.

Eddie Coyle, the authority's director of public health, said that as Ashley's death was an isolated case there was no requirement for emergency public health measures within the school.

But he said the authority had agreed to consider the feasibility of bringing forward the vaccination programme in the light of the "considerable anxiety" of parents.

He said the fact that the children were due to be vaccinated in due course and that it had proved feasible to reschedule the programme were important factors in the decision.