Brazil Welcomes Global Move on Drug Patents

The Brazilian government, which has challenged the giant drug companies' patent defenses perhaps more aggressively than any other country, hailed the World Trade Organization's (WTO) declaration on drug patents as an important victory for the developing world's fight against epidemics like AIDS. The decision also promises to open the way for Brazil to realize a long-held ambition -- to export its low-cost versions of AIDS drugs to countries without resources to produce their own.

In Brazil's view, the text of the agreement reached at Doha, Qatar, gives each of the organization's 144 members discretion to set its own rules for issuing "compulsory licenses," which force patent holders to allow rivals to manufacture patented drugs. And each country is free under the agreement to set its own criteria for what constitutes a national public health emergency, the justification for compulsory licenses. Before the Doha conference, the question of compulsory licenses had been left unclear in the organization's 1994 treaty on intellectual property rights.

Brazil has been in the forefront of attacking AIDS in the developing world since 1998, when it began copying and producing some of the antiretroviral drugs used in "cocktails" to treat AIDS. The Health Ministry provides the cocktails free to patients, and turned to making them domestically when the cost of importing brand name drugs threatened to bankrupt the program. Under pressure from the drug companies, the United States government threatened to bring a complaint against Brazil at the WTO, accusing it of violating the 1994 treaty. Now, the Brazilian government says, the Doha declaration means that it no longer has anything to fear from such complaints.

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