Withholding the cure.

• Author: Siegal, N.A.

Bill Haddad helped create the U.S. Peace Corps and now works as a volunteer for a generic drug manufacturer, Cipla Ltd., based in India. Haddad's mission is to bring inexpensive medication to dying populations in the Third World. Wherever he goes, he carries an eyedropper filled with a drug called Neverapine, which is known to reduce the risk of transmitting HIV/AIDS from an HIV-positive pregnant woman to her unborn child.

The bottle of Neverapine costs Cipla less than forty cents to produce, Haddad says, and each one contains about 200 doses. The mother is given one drop when she goes into labor, the baby is delivered by Caesarian section, and the newborn is given a single drop within forty-eight hours of birth. Using this method, the risk of infecting the newborn is reduced by 90 percent, says Haddad.

Haddad gives away his eyedroppers to pediatric hospitals at no cost and donates them to physicians in small villages in sub-Saharan Africa where AIDS has so devastated the population that only the very old and the very young survive. Yet many countries, such as Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, won't let him.

"Because of alleged patent laws or other political barriers, I can't do it in most of the sub-Saharan countries and in half the Latin American countries," he says. "We produce the drugs legally, and the international law says we can do it. The companies have public statements that say, 'We won't prevent you.' But then, some piece of paper arrives and stops you."

The piece of paper is usually a legal notice informing him of an injunction by one of the major brand-name pharmaceutical companies in the United States or other countries that develop and patent new medications, Haddad says. The notice usually states that his life-saving efforts violate intellectual property laws.

To Haddad, each one is a death certificate for scores of infants.

"Every trip I'm on, I run into 100 people who die," he says. "I don't have the words to describe what's really happening. It's Dickensian: children who are under five dying without one dose of medications that we could give them for free. You send the drugs for free and they don't get distributed. Frustrating would be the mild word for it."

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Less than two years ago, the nations of the world assembled a the World Trade Organization's 2001 meeting in Doha, Qatar, seemed to agree that treating poor pee pie in the world's indigent nations was a higher priority than maintaining the intellectual property claims of multinational corporations. At Doha that November, 142 nations signed a historic agreement that allowed governments to override international patent protections and produce generic versions e medicines for a small fraction of the price charged by brand-name drug makers.

The pact, known as the Doha Declaration, was good news for the more than thirty million African living with HIV and MDS, and millions more people in developing countries dying of illnesses that are treatable or curable in the West (such as measles influenza, asthma, various types of cancer, and digestive diseases). But since it was signed, the United States, the European Union, Canada, Japan, and other wealthy countries have attempted to undermine that agreement, say nongovernmental organization such as Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), Oxfam, and Africa Action.

"They're seeking about four types of restrictions, says Asia Russell, who directs international policy a Health GAP, an activist organization founded in 1999 to campaign for increased access to affordable medication in developing countries. These...