GENEVA (Reuters) - U.S. Health Secretary Tommy Thompson, joint head of Washington's anti-AIDS drive, said on Wednesday cheap drugs were no panacea for the pandemic that kills millions of people a year mainly in Africa.
Thompson said that he was confident international prices for anti-AIDS drugs would continue to fall but that other measures were needed if the virus infecting some 36 million people -- 25 million of them in Africa -- were to be contained.
"You cannot just buy drugs because that will not solve the problem," he told journalists in Geneva where the World Health Organization is holding its annual assembly.
"You have to have strong prevention, strong infrastructure," he said, adding that developing such elements would require of an international effort similar to the so-called Marshall Plan the U.S. financed to rebuild Europe after World War Two.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for a $7 billion international fund to help fight the spread of AIDS and Washington has already pledged $200 million to the effort -- becoming the first developed country to answer the call.
But Thompson, named recently by President Bush to lead an anti-AIDS task force together with Secretary of State Colin Powell, said the U.S. was firmly against any erosion of the patent rights of international drugs companies covering the anti-AIDS treatments they had developed.
Developing countries, spearheaded by Brazil, are launching a fresh campaign at the WHO meeting this week to weaken these rights by saying that health should be considered a human right and take precedence over commercial interests.
In a motion expected to be put to a vote at the assembly on Thursday, Brazil calls for intellectual property rights -- or patents -- to be considered "subordinate to the concurrent goal of ensuring present and future access to essential drugs."
"Access to health is a human right and...access to essential drugs is part of the human right to health," the motion adds.
Brazil, where AIDS treatment is state-funded, won a similar non-binding vote at the 53-member U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva last month, with only the U.S. voting against.
South Africa, which in April won a legal battle with multinational drugs makers over the right to import cheaper copies of AIDS drugs, told the WHO assembly Tuesday that poor countries should be entitled to buy generic drugs for a wide range of killer diseases, not just AIDS.
But Thompson, whose full title is Secretary of State for Health and Human Services, warned that throwing international patent laws out of the window would simply curtail vital research that costs drugs makers billions of dollars.
He also said he was confident that drugs companies would continue to cut the cost of key drugs, particularly for Annan's fund.
The head of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Associations (IPFMA) agreed countries could prune drug costs by negotiating with pharmaceutical companies via the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations.
"Governments like Senegal and Ivory Coast have told various people that patented medicines from the originating brand companies have been as cheap or cheaper than generic versions," Harvey Bale told a news conference.
"It's a question of approaching and negotiating, putting in place those mechanisms which ensure that people get medicine."
©Reuters May 16 2001 12:49PM