Reuters – Thu 25 Jan 2007 8:58:13 GMT:

Thailand’s army-installed government has issued compulsory licences for cheap versions of a heart disease and an AIDS drug, the health minister said on Thursday, a move likely to enrage global pharmaceutical giants.

“The laws have been signed and they are now effective,” Health Minister Mongkol na Songkhla told Reuters.

Mongkol said the drugs were for treatment of HIV-AIDS and heart disease, but declined to confirm newspaper reports they were Abbott’s Kaletra, and Plavix, a blockbuster anti-clotting agent sold by Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb .

He cited the ballooning costs of treatment as the reason for the move.

“We have to do this because we have so many patients to treat with so little budget. We can’t watch our people die and their patents have been here for so long,” Mongkol said.

“It’s very, very worrying when companies’ intellectual property rights are not supported within a country,” said Judy Benn, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand.

Topic of the day, what is a government’s primary duty: Protecting the life of its citizens or the intellectual property of foreign corporations?