PARIS, Dec 23 (AFP) - An anti-AIDS activist group charged Monday that rich countries failed to mount a serious effort at WTO talks last week to reach an agreement ensuring that poor nations have access to affordable medicine.

The group, Act Up-Paris, accused the United States in particular of having tried to limit the scope of the negotiations at the World Trade Organization, which were abandoned early Saturday without an accord.

"Rich countries, by refusing to give the question serious consideration and by refusing real negotiations, demonstrated the ineffectiveness and the dangers of the system they wanted to impose on the rest of the world," Act Up-Paris said in a statement.

"The failure of the WTO talks is easy to explain. For one year, a certain number of rich countries has pursued a single objective -- to go back on the principle agreed in Doha that public health should take precedence over commercial interests."

WTO ministers meeting in the Qatari capital Doha in November 2001 agreed in principle that poor nations battling epidemics such as AIDS or malaria should be allowed access to cheaper generic copies of patented medicines.

But at a meeting in Geneva last week to devise a means of implementing that principle, negotiators were unable to agree on a relaxation in global patent rules.

The new arrangement would have allowed poor countries without pharmaceutical industries to import cheaper generic medicines.

Act Up-Paris accused the United States of "doing everything to restrict the scope of the talks to certain diseaes, a position that is contrary to the Doha declaration and completely unjustifiable from a health standpoint."

US representatives at the Geneva talks held out for more specific wording in a draft statement, which in its current form refers to "public health problems ... especially those resulting from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics."

Washington feared that the formulation could allow drugs for non-infectious illnesses such as diabetes or asthma to be included under the new regime.

WTO negotiators are to try to again to reach consensus on the issue at a meeting February 10-11.

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