Orshe

Hundreds of thousands of Americans usually stay home at some point during the winter battling fever, aches and pains — all the result of a normal flu season. But this flu season is clearly marching to a different drummer.

The World Health Organization’s influenza experts have finished a four-day meeting and decided that protection against H1N1 swine flu should be included in the next regular flu-season vaccine.

Pfizer gave its first pipeline update since it took over Wyeth in October. Bottom line: The company now has has about 500 products somewhere along the path between early-stage human trials and registration, down from about an initial 600 in the combined company’s pipeline.

Merck shares rose 3.7% yesterday; the WSJ, among others, cite Credit Suisse analyst Catherine Arnold’s decision to raise her rating on the stock to “outperform.”

So what did Arnold say in the note that apparently added a few billion to Merck’s market cap? Here’s a bit of her reasoning:

The pipeline has potential “to offer upside relative to investor expectiations.” She cites experimental drugs for blood clots and hepatitis, and a vaccine for staph.

A couple interesting hires in corporate health-care were announced today:

Here’s a quick tour of drug and vaccine news from around the globe:

Flu vaccine is grown in chicken eggs — a powerful symbol for how old and clunky the manufacturing process is. As it turns out, though, figuring out how to grow vaccine without the eggs doesn’t do a whole lot to get vaccine out the door more quickly, the WSJ reports this morning.

Here are a few threads from around the world on what’s happening with the H1N1 swine-flu pandemic.

Four patients in the past six weeks had Tamiflu-resistant flu at Duke University Hospital. In at least two of the cases, patients contracted the resistant bug before they had been treated with Tamiflu, a Duke infection-control doctor told the Health Blog. All of the patients were on a cancer ward, and had suppressed immune systems.

Just in case you’re wondering, there’s no industry money behind this rather slick video that features two former senators pushing for new vaccine technology. Instead, taxpayers are picking up the tab through a commission set up by Congress to thwart weapons of mass destruction. “Every penny — and it wasn’t very much — was all government funds from the WMD commission,” the commission’s executive director told the Health Blog. We’ll explain after the video.

In the push to get Americans vaccinated against both the seasonal flu and the swine flu, infectious disease experts and public health officials are also sounding the alarm about continuing low rates of adult vaccination for a host of other preventable diseases, as I write in my latest column.