US releases pandemic plan

Over the weekend, with the bird flu threat getting major media play, details of the government's plan for coping with a pandemic were emerging. Officials said they expect local agencies to take the lead in the event of an outbreak. Less stress is placed on military involvement than critics had feared. The Department of Health and Human Services said it thinks a major outbreak could kill as many as 1.9 million Americans and affect about half the population. Anxiety was heightened by reports of new outbreaks in Turkey and Romania.

On Wall Street, investors are intrigued by the possibility that all of the noise may translate into good news for the companies involved in vaccine production and related areas of the pharma and biotech industries. Shares of Sanofi-Aventis, the company behind an experimental vaccine for the virus, were up; and shares of MedImmune, the Maryland-based biotech working with HHS on alternative vaccines, were up as much as 10 percent over the last 10 days.

- see this article in The Washington Post

PLUS: Reacting to the new interest in vaccines, GlaxoSmithKline said it is tripling vaccine production and confirmed it is working on its own bird flu vaccine. Article (Wall Street Journal sub. req.)

ALSO: With supplies of effective drugs limited, interest is growing in alternatives. One candidate may be BioCryst's peramivir. Article