Merrill Goozner in Chicago Tribune THIRD WORLD BATTLES FOR AIDS DRUGS

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

This is Merrill Goozner's 1,600 word article
in the Chicago Tribune on the battle over 
compulsory licensing of  essential medicines.  
Jamie



http://chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/article/0,1051,SAV-9904280067,00.html

THIRD WORLD BATTLES FOR AIDS DRUGS

By Merrill Goozner
Washington Bureau
April 28, 1999

WASHINGTON -- Though the AIDS epidemic is
taking its steepest toll in some of the poorest regions 
of the world, the U.S. government and the nation's
pharmaceuticals industry are fighting efforts to make
the latest life-saving drugs more widely available
there.



  [snip]

While the World Trade Organization jealously guards
intellectual property rights among its member nations,
its global rules of trade do allow for what is known as
"compulsory licensing" if it is done to combat a
national emergency.

In a country with more than 3 million HIV cases,
where one-quarter of pregnant mothers in the poorest
provinces are HIV-positive, the new South African
compulsory licensing law would seem to meet the
WTO's national-emergency guidelines.

The South African law was designed to "ensure
through either global market forces or local market
forces that medicines become affordable for the
people of South Africa," said Ian Roberts, special
assistant to the government's health minister.

But the law angered the U.S. pharmaceuticals
industry, which fears that widespread licensing of its
products will lead to a global "gray market" in
low-priced drugs and undermine its profits and
incentive to spend on costly research.

It pressed its allies in the U.S. government to swing
into action against the South African law.

They quickly complied. In Congress, Rep. Rodney
Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) inserted a rider in last
October's appropriations bill that temporarily cut off
foreign aid to South Africa as a way of pressuring the
State Department to take more forceful action against
the law.

U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky,
saying the South African law was too broad and might
be applied to other medicines, denied South Africa
special tariff breaks on its exports to the U.S., a move
designed to pressure the government to repeal the
law. Vice President Al Gore also raised the issue
when he visited Mandela earlier this year.

   [snip] 


AIDS activists, not-for-profit clinics and some health
ministers from developing countries have pressed the
World Health Organization to take up the licensing
issue. A draft of a resolution that will be considered by
world health ministers next month in Geneva
commands developing countries "to explore their
options under relevant international agreements,
including trade agreements, to safeguard access to
essential drugs."


   [snip]

Mark Biot, a Belgium-based physician who oversees 
Doctors Without Borders'
worldwide AIDS efforts, said clinics in most of the
larger cities of the developing world would be fully
equipped to handle AIDS patients if they had access
to affordable tests and drugs.

Biot recently returned from Thailand, where people
begin lining up outside Bamrasnaradura Hospital in
central Bangkok at 3 a.m. for the weekly AIDS clinic
run by his group.

"This is not an undeveloped country," he said. "They
have labs and the real opportunity to treat people who
are HIV-positive or have opportunistic infections."

The clinic is seeing an increasing number of people
who have recently stopped using the combination of
AZT and Videx or didanosine (ddI), a reverse
transcriptase inhibitor made by Bristol-Myers Squibb.
The two drugs taken in combination slow the onset of
AIDS.

Because of the Asian financial crisis, those drugs
were removed from the government's essential
medicines list and are no longer distributed at
subsidized prices, according to Biot.

A spokeswoman for Bristol-Myers said the company
still supplied the government with Videx but refused to
discuss negotiations over its price.



   [snip]



The activists claim the U.S. government pressured the
Thai government to abandon its efforts to license the
drugs to local manufacturers.

Papovich, who oversees intellectual property issues at
the U.S. Trade Representative's office, said he could
not recall discussions about compulsory licensing of
drugs. He said the U.S. threatened Thailand's special
tariff breaks because it failed to curb piracy of
copyrighted goods like CDs and software.

But the U.S. trade representative's recently published
annual report on Foreign Trade Barriers tells a
different story. The report said U.S. businesses were
upset that a new Thai pharmaceuticals law might
allow compulsory licensing of drugs.

"It's painfully clear U.S. trade representatives are not
used to community groups questioning what they do,"
said Ron McGinnis, director of AIDS programs at the
Global Health Council, in Washington. "People now
want to know how trade policies affect access to
care."


-- 
James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology
I can be reached at love@cptech.org, by telephone 202.387.8030,
by fax at 202.234.5176. CPT web page is http://www.cptech.org