[Ip-health] Thailand plans 3 More Compulsory Licenses

[robert weissman]

*http://nationmultimedia.com/2007/01/25/national/national_30025030.php
The Nation

MEDICAL CARE*
*Cheaper generic drugs will help ease health crisis*

*Breaking patents will give affordable treatment to HIV and heart
patients *

Thailand is planning to "legally" break the patents of three more drugs,
two of which are medications for HIV treatment and the other for the
country's most common type of heart disease, Public Health Minister Dr
Mongkol na Songkhla said yesterday.

The country is in critical need of the drugs yet cannot afford to cover
the cost of treatment due to the limited healthcare budget, he said.

The universal healthcare scheme that takes care of around 48 million
Thais, including about 500,000 people living with HIV and an enormous
number of patients with cardiovascular heart disease, has an
insufficient budget to ensure treatment for all, said Mongkol.

He added that many people receiving treatment for HIV had faced severe
allergy problems with drugs and needed to move on to a second-line drug
which remained expensive.

Drugs for heart disease were also too expensive for the scheme to pay for.

In the case of heart disease, the drug required costs about Bt70 per
tablet, or 10 times higher than the price of a generic version of the
same drug, he said.

The average cost of HIV treatment using second-line drugs is between
Bt1,300 to Bt2,000 per patient per month - compared to only about Bt680
for treatment using generic drugs.

"We need to use this method in order to make good drugs more affordable
and accessible," said Mongkol.

The minister requested to withhold further details of the three drugs
until the ministry announces the government's compulsory licensing
officially on January 29.

Moreover, Mongkol said, the Clinton Foundation along with 22 American
house representatives had expressed their support for Thailand's move to
impose compulsory licensing to improve public access to life-saving drugs.

There were more drugs being considered for compulsory licensing (CL), he
said. "We are not simply going to do CL on more and more drugs, but only
the drugs in critical need that the state cannot afford to buy."

Usually, it would be a drug the country had bought at the price of the
original product for several years - not a new drug, Mongkol said.

"CL is legitimate domestically and internationally and Thailand is not
the first to do compulsory licensing," he said, adding the US had done
over 300 compulsory licensings of drugs

The first so-called compulsory licensing in Thailand was carried out on
Efavirenz, an antiretroviral drug.

The first import of the generic version of the drug from India is
expected to arrive on February 10, said Mongkol.

The imported drug is to be used while waiting for the Government
Pharmaceutical Organisation to produce a generic version of Efavirenz on
its own.

Arthit Khwankom

The Nation