Thailand’s Public Health Minister will travel to Washington to meet U.S. trade officials this month in an effort to avoid retaliation against his country’s plan to copy drugs made by Abbott, Sanofi-Aventis and Merck.

Mongkol Na Songkhla will meet with Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and is seeking talks with Deputy US Trade Rep Karan Bhatia, the US embassy in Bangkok says. Mongkol is considering ordering a Thai government agency to make Abbott’s Kaletra AIDS med, a Merck AIDS drug and a Sanofi heart med unless the companies cut their prices.

Thailand, which is seeking medical treatment for all of its 220,000 HIV-infected citizens, joined China, Russia and nine other nations last month on the US Trade Rep’s Priority Watch list of the world’s worst infringers of intellectual property rights. Thailand’s economy may suffer because the US is the largest buyer of its exports.

“This is a big worry of the Thai people because it can be really harmful for trade relationships,” Mongkol tells Bloomberg News. The US bought $19.5 billion worth of Thai goods last year. Earlier this week, Thai officials drew only a handful of people to a presentation about investing in the country during the BIO convention in Boston, where some 22,000 people gathered.

This is the second time this week that Thai officials have sounded contrite. At the BIO presentation, Siriwat Tiptaradol, secretary general of Thailand’s FDA, told Pharmalot that his country is through with issuing compulsory licenses for pharmaceuticals, at least for now. “At this moment, no other drugs will come up for CL from the ministry of public health,” he said.

The Thai government acted after a recommendation by the World Bank in August that Thailand consider issuing compulsory licenses under a World Trade Organization provision that allows governments to permit generic-drug production without the patent owners’ consent in some cases.

Thailand says copying the drugs will allow the government to provide free medicine to a larger share of its poorest citizens. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers’ Association, a drug industry trade group, says taking that step would remove the incentive to invest in research, and that its members would retaliate by not introducing new drugs in Thailand. Abbott has already threatened to suspend new medicines and sell only those it already markets.

“They said respecting intellectual property is so critical,” said Buddhima Lokuge, who manages a drugs access campaign in New York for medical aid group Doctors Without Borders. “To actually withdraw medicines is sort of saying we don’t really care about the patient, or we’re going to use them in this commercial debate as pawns.”

Full story in Bloomberg News;
The US Trade Rep report.[tags]Abbott Laboratories, AIDS, Compulsory Licensing, Generics, Patents, Thailand, US Trade Rep[/tags]