In standard Thai* or Siamese, that’s the pronounciation for ‘uncle.’ And several drugmakers are saying yaawm right now, after the Thai government threatened to issue compulsory licenses for AIDS and heart meds. Other countries, of course, are watching to see how drugmakers react.

“People told us, ‘It’s useless to negotiate with them unless you start to announce that you want to go for compulsory licensing. Then they start to talk to you,’ ” Suwit Wibulpolprasert, a senior adviser on disease control at the Thai Ministry of Public Health, tells The International Herald Tribune. “We learned that lesson. After we announced our intention to implement compulsory licensing they knocked at our door almost every day.”

Abbott is now slashing the price of its Kaletra AIDS med in low-and medium-income countries, including Thailand, to $1,000 a patient per year. That is cheaper than any generic on the market and 55 percent less than the current price. Novartis offered an effective 75 percent price reduction this week on Gleevec, after Thai officials said they were studying a compulsory license. And Merck has offered to cut the price of its HIV drug Efavirenz after the Thai government announced it would break the patent for that drug last November.

Drugmakers were stunned by the quick succession of compulsory licenses - and worried about the threat of more, says Paul Cawthorne, who heads Doctors Without Borders in Thailand. “It’s panicked some of the companies here, thinking, ‘Oh God, they are really going to go crazy here and issue lots and lots of CLs and maybe other countries will follow suit.’ ”

India’s health minister, in fact, threatened Novartis this week that a compulsory license may be issued for Gleevec if the drugmaker doesn’t yank its lawsuit challenging patent rulings.

Repeat after me: ‘Yaawm.’

The complete story in The International Herald Tribune.

* Thai dictionary.[tags]Abbott Laboratories, Compulsory Licensing, Generics, Gleevec, India, Kaletra, Merck, Novartis, Patents, Plavix, Sanofi-Aventis, Thailand[/tags]