The state-run Government Pharmaceutical Organisation (GPO) yesterday threatened to take legal action against the USA for Innovation group for defaming its reputation and its well-known Aids drug via advertisements in newspapers.

Dr Wichai Chokewiwat, chairman of the GPO board, told a press conference that an advertisement placed in The Nation on Thursday and in the Bangkok Post and its Thai-language sister paper Post Today yesterday had "distorted" some information and damaged the GPO's reputation.

"Legal action would not affect the relationship between the two countries as it would be a case between organisation and organisation, not state and state," he said.

Wichai said he was considering the next step with the GPO's legal team.

USA for Innovation is an American organisation run by Kenneth Adelman, a senior counsellor at Edelman Public Relations Worldwide. Among its major clients are giant drug-makers. One is Abbott Laboratories, producer of the expensive life-saving Aids drug Kaletra, on which the Thai government decided to lift the patent so that a cheaper generic version could be sold. Other drug firms on Edelman's books include Merck, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis and Pfizer.

In the provocative, full-page advert, USA for Innovation claimed that GPO-Vir, a generic version of an anti-retroviral drug, had a high resistance of between 39.6 and 58 per cent, making it "one of the worst cases of HIV drug resistance in the world". The advert claimed the figures came from a 2005 study by Mahidol University.

It was not clear which study the advert referred to. However, Wasan Chantratita, head of the virology department at Mahidol's Ramathibodi Hospital, said the figures were quite close to those in his paper, which studied drug resistance among those who had carried the HIV/Aids virus for years. Wasan studied 1,850 long-term patients with a resistance to first-line drugs and found 948 had resistance to GPO-Vir.

"The rate of resistance is high because our studied group is the one that is supposed to resist GPO-Vir, not because the drug is substandard, and I never said that the drug was one of the worst," Wasan said.

Wichai said he believed that USA for Innovation "intended to mislead the public by mixing up information to convince the public that the rate of resistance is among all people living with HIV in the country".

The GPO introduced the drug, which is a combination of three previously developed anti-retrovirals, to Thailand in 2003 with the aim of providing people in need with an affordable drug.

The advert stirred up a publicity war between Thai health officials and Aids activists on the one hand and the US pharmaceutical industry, sparked when the Public Health Ministry decided to issue a compulsory licence for Merck's Aids drug efavirenz last November.

The war became more intense in March when the ministry announced its decision to exercise its rights under the World Trade Organisation to compulsorily license two more drugs. Abbott's Kaletra and Plavix, made by Sanofi-Aventis.

Thai Aids activists and academics who support the use of compulsory licences are now preparing to launch their own advert in the mass media.

The USA for Innovation advert provoked a debate about the mass media and their social responsibility. However, Jon Ungpakorn, secretary-general of Thailand's Aids Access Foundation, said he did not think it was wrong for newspapers to publish the advert.

"An ad is an ad. It always contains a message of propaganda, and it did not reflect an editorial point of view," he said in a telephone interview.

Jon said, however, that it would be better if newspapers clearly showed readers that the provocative message was an advertisement and not an editorial.

He also saw a positive point in the USA for Innovation advert.

"Read it carefully", he said. "You will see the advertiser's self-interest. It pretended to be concerned about Thai Aids patients but intended to provoke them into using its brand-name drugs."

Duangkamol Sathirawattanakul,

Pennapa Hongthong

The Nation