Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Brazil May Seek to Break AIDS Drug Patents

Called "voluntary licensing," the policy is aimed at allowing government laboratories or Brazilian pharmaceutical manufacturers under government contract to produce generic versions of the drugs.
"To guarantee the sustainability of our (AIDS) program, we need to produce these drugs ourselves," Jarbas Barbosa, a high-ranking official with Brazil's health ministry, told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview Tuesday. "Even with recent price reductions that we obtained from drug producers, the total cost of retroviral (anti-AIDS) drugs is growing in an unbearable way."

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