ECONOMICS

G-20 LEADERS SAY OIL PRICES MAY LEAD TO INFLATION

Surging oil prices may fuel global inflation, the Group of 20 industrial and developing nations said, as policy-makers including the European Central Bank’s Jean-Claude Trichet and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan weigh interest rate increases.

“All central banks expressed it as their duty to maintain price stability in their own economic universes,” Mr. Trichet said after the annual meeting of the G-20 countries on Saturday. “That received a very, very, very large consensus.”

Central bankers are stepping up their inflation-fighting rhetoric as a 49% surge in oil prices this year prompts companies to raise prices. Mr. Trichet said inflation may exceed the ECB’s 2% ceiling in 2006, inching the bank closer to its first rate rise in five years. Price risks “appeared to have increased,” the minutes of the last Federal Reserve meeting, released October 11, said.

– Bloomberg News

PUBLIC HEALTH

U.S. MAY PROVIDE INCENTIVES FOR PRODUCTION OF FLU VACCINE

The American government might be willing to provide incentives or aid to encourage pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis to make vaccines against avian influenza, the secretary of health and human services, Mike Leavitt, said.

“We’re discussing with them and acknowledging the fact that there is a compelling national interest for a vaccine manufacturing capacity to exist,” Mr. Leavitt said yesterday outside the Vietnamese capital Hanoi, where he is on an official visit. When asked if the government may be willing to provide incentives or aid, Mr. Leavitt said, “In certain circumstances, there may be no other way.”

The mutation of a bird-flu virus to spread easily from person to person may spark a global flu pandemic, according to the World Health Organization. A gap between projected vaccine demand during any flu pandemic and current manufacturing capacity has caused America to ask what companies could do to generate sufficient supply, Mr. Leavitt said.

President Bush met on October 7 at the White House with executives from six pharmaceutical companies: Chiron, GlaxoSmithKline, MedImmune, Merck, Sanofi-Aventis, and Wyeth.

“It’s been over 30 years since we’ve had a pandemic, so inevitably we’re going to have a pandemic within a reasonable period of time,” the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, said. “When we say ‘inevitable,’ we don’t mean inevitably it’s going to be” the H5N1 strain, he said. “We’re saying, inevitably we’re going to get another pandemic, and it may be H5N1.”

– Bloomberg News

INDIAN DRUGMAKER SAYS IT PLANS TO SELL GENERIC TREATMENT FOR BIRD FLU

Cipla, India’s second-biggest drugmaker, said it plans to become the first company to sell a generic version of Roche Holding’s Tamiflu, the antiviral treatment for bird flu, by the end of the year.

“We will be equipped to fight if there is a widespread outbreak of the disease in India,” the joint managing director of Cipla, Amar Lulla, said in a telephone interview on Saturday in Mumbai, where the company is based.

– Bloomberg News

PUBLISHING

TIME INC.’S PEARLSTINE EXPECTED TO STEP DOWN BY YEAR’S END

The longtime editorial chief of the Time Incorporated magazine empire, Norman Pearlstine, is planning to step aside by the end of the year or even sooner, several people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Pearlstine is likely to be succeeded as editor in chief of Time Incorporated by John Huey, who is currently the editorial director, according to people who spoke on condition they not be named. The move has been widely anticipated for months, but the timing was uncertain. Mr. Pearlstine, who is 63, has been editor in chief of Time Incorporated for 11 years. Mr. Huey is 57.As editor in chief, Mr. Pearlstine had broad oversight of Time Incorporated’s growing stable of magazines, which includes the flagship Time as well as People, Sports Illustrated, and Real Simple. The company now has 155 titles around the world.

– Associated Press