The United States has blocked a deal to give African and other developing countries access to affordable lifesaving drugs but called for a temporary moratorium on drug patents until an agreement is reached.
Negotiators for 144 member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO), who met in Geneva on 20 December, said they were disappointed, because they had pledged to reach an agreement by the end of 2002, under the Doha Declaration a year ago (BMJ 2001;323:1146).
The plan is to ease the WTO's rules on patents so that drugs such as antiretrovirals for combating HIV infection and AIDS could be produced to meet urgent public health needs in the world's poorer countries.
Developing countries accused the United States of acting under pressure from the pharma- ceuticals lobby, but diplomats said the 15 European Union states, and Switzerland, were secretly relieved that the deal did not go ahead in its current form.
The United States insisted that the draft agreement should be limited to drugs for HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other infectious epidemics and feared that the current document could lead to drugs for non-infectious illnesses falling under the new regimen.
African countries said the fear of abuse of an agreement was “not well founded.”
“Any attempt to redefine this declaration will unravel the careful balance achieved on many issues at Doha,” Kenyan ambassador Amina Chawahir Mohamed told a meeting of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Council in Geneva last week.
The US trade representative's office proposed a moratorium, promising not to challenge any country that broke WTO rules to export generic versions of patented drugs to developing countries facing a public health crisis.
“The United States has worked intensively to find a solution that will provide lifesaving drugs to those truly in need, and will continue to work toward that end,” US trade representative Robert Zoellick said.
“We urge others to join us in this moratorium [on WTO dispute settlement actions for patent violations] to help poor countries get access to emergency lifesaving drugs,” Zoellick said.
The United States said its moratorium would not apply to the illegal export of patented drugs to 14 developing countries—including Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Israel, which are classified by the World Bank as high income countries. But it said the action would allow the world's poorest countries to have access to HIV/AIDS test kits and lifesaving drugs, including those for diseases such as ebola, African trypanosomiasis, cholera, dengue, and typhoid. (See Editor's choice.)