Brazil May Defy U.S. And Make More AIDS Drugs

Raising the stakes in a trade dispute with the United States, Brazil on Friday threatened to begin producing two AIDS drugs by June if prices on the imported patented medicines do not drop, an official said.

The threat was made a day after the World Trade Organization (WTO) established a dispute panel to examine a U.S. complaint that Brazilian patent law discriminated against imports.

At the heart of the dispute is Brazil’s 1997 patent law that allows local companies to win the legal right to produce another firm’s patented product in specific cases.

The U.S. says its complaint centers on "Article 71" of the Brazilian patent law, which requires foreign firms to manufacture drugs — or any other patented product — within Brazil or lose that right to a local competitor after three years.

A U.S. trade official in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the U.S. case is "about whose workers get to make the patented technology. It’s not about health."

But Brazil’s Health Ministry said the U.S. challenge puts at risk Brazil’s world-renowned AIDS program, which freely distributes antiretroviral drugs and manufactures many of them.

In absolute numbers, Brazil suffers from a high rate of AIDS infection, with 190,000 cases of HIV infection registered. But it has become a model in the AIDS fight, with only 0.6 percent of the adult population infected.

The United States strongly denied charges that its request for a WTO investigation could jeopardize Brazil’s successful anti-AIDS drug program.

The U.S. Embassy in Brazil released a statement on Friday saying the request "is in no way contrary to Brazilian policies to improve access to medicines, including those destined to the treatment of AIDS/HIV."

Brazil makes eight AIDS drugs

Starting in 1994, Brazil’s government urged local firms to start making drugs to treat AIDS. Brazil now makes eight of the 12 drugs used in the so-called AIDS cocktail.

The prices of AIDS drugs that Brazil does produce have plummeted more than 70 percent. A typical treatment now costs about $4,500 in Brazil, compared with about $12,000 in the United States.

A Brazilian government official said if the cost of the two most expensive drugs in the AIDS cocktail, Nelfinavir and Efavirenz, do not come down, Brazil will start producing them too.

"By June, the government will break the patents on the two AIDS drugs that are still legally protected if the industry does not lower prices," said Paulo Teixeira, head of the Brazilian Health Ministry’s AIDS program.

Nelfinavir is produced by Swiss health group Roche and Efavirenz is made U.S.-based Merck Sharp & Dohm.

"We reiterate that we are open to negotiation and would prefer some kind of an accord," Teixeira said. "But our primordial goal is to guarantee that there won’t be an interruption in the universal distribution of medicines."

Brazil was not alone in worrying that the U.S. complaint to the WTO could affect Brazil’s AIDS program.

Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) called on the United States on Thursday to withdraw its complaint, arguing that it might handicap Brazil’s program.