Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - Wednesday November 14, 2001
Katherine Baldwin

Brazil, emboldened by its own success in challenging drug companies over the price of AIDS drugs for domestic use, played a pivotal role in a coalition of developing nations that won the deal at the WTO talks in Qatar, Brazilian and pharmaceutical association officials said.

Trade ministers of the 142-nation WTO approved an agreement aimed at helping countries devastated by pandemics such as AIDS or malaria do one of two things -- either skirt patent protection rules to produce or buy cheaper generic drugs, or challenge pharmaceutical firms to cut prices under the threat of having their patents broken.

"This is the culmination of a long process ... which Brazil mobilized and vindicated in the name of all developing countries," Paulo Teixeira, the director of Brazil's AIDS program, told Reuters from Doha, Qatar.

"We will no longer have to work with the eternal prospect of lawsuits from other countries questioning Brazil's policies," added Teixeira, who headed Brazil's negotiating team with Health Minister Jose Serra.

The United States earlier this year withdraw a complaint it had filed through the WTO challenging Brazil's patent laws, which forced drug companies to produce or license more cheaply in Brazil within three years of receiving a patent. Washington, which said it was defending the rights and research capabilities of drug companies, relented after AIDS activists charged the U.S. complaint was an attack on Brazil's successful AIDS treatment program, which uses health workers to supervise drug cocktails for the poorest of the poor.

U.S. drugs firms on Wednesday shrugged off the Doha declaration, saying it merely restated the a 1994 intellectual property accord called TRIPS. But Teixeira said the declaration was phrased in a way that allowed for more flexibility than the earlier accord.

DRUGS FIRMS IN SIGHTS

Brazil in past years has won international recognition for its AIDS fight thanks to aggressive prevention campaigns, its distribution of a free anti-AIDS drug cocktail to sufferers and tough price negotiations with drugs firms.

In absolute terms, Brazil has a high number of registered AIDS cases at 210,000 but it has managed to keep HIV infection to less than one percent of the population.

Brazil produces eight of the 12 drugs used in the AIDS cocktail. This year it also won discounts of 40 percent to 65 percent on AIDS drugs from Switzerland's Roche and the U.S.'s Merck & Co. Inc. after threatening to copy their drugs locally.

Brazil is now negotiating with Abbott Laboratories Inc. to lower prices on its HIV drug Kaletra.

The Doha accord "gives us assurance to confront abusive pricing," said Teixeira.

The U.S. Pharmaceutical Association and Merck, however, said any action taken by countries to copy patented drugs would still have to comply with TRIPS, which the drugs industry says is an essential tool to promote research into new medicines.

Association spokesman Mark Grayson agreed that Brazil had played a key role in patent talks: "Certainly Brazil has been recognized as a hard negotiator in all international negotiations and this was no different."
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