SÃO PAULO, Brazil, Nov. 15 — The Brazilian government, which has challenged the giant drug companies' patent defenses perhaps more aggressively than any other country, hailed the World Trade Organization's declaration on drug patents as an important victory for the developing world's fight against health scourges like AIDS.

The decision also promises to open the way for Brazil to realize a long-held ambition: to export its low-cost versions of AIDS drugs to countries without the resources to produce their own.

Such exports have frequently been blocked by confusion surrounding international patent rules and by pressure from multinational pharmaceutical companies, which scared off many countries that might have been buyers.

In Brazil's view, the text of the agreement reached at Doha, Qatar, gives each of the organization's 144 members discretion to set its own rules for issuing "compulsory licenses," which force patent holders to allow rivals to manufacture patented drugs. And each country is free under the agreement to set its own criteria for what constitutes a national public health emergency, the justification for compulsory licenses.

Before the Doha conference, the question of compulsory licenses had been left unclear in the organization's 1994 treaty on intellectual property rights.

Brazil has been on the forefront of attacking AIDS in the developing world since 1998, when it began copying and producing some of the antiretroviral drugs used in "cocktails" to treat AIDS. The Health Ministry provides the cocktails free to patients, and turned to making them domestically when the cost of importing brand name drugs threatened to bankrupt the program. Brazilian patent law protects drugs only if they were commercialized after 1997.

Unlike India, where private companies do most of the copycat drug making, Brazil has made patent breaking a direct activity of the government. Seven state- owned laboratories now produce generic copies of 8 of the 12 drugs used in the AIDS cocktail, at a tiny fraction of the prices charged by multinational pharmaceutical giants like Merck (news/quote) and Roche.

Under pressure from the drug companies, the United States government threatened to bring a complaint against Brazil at the World Trade Organization, accusing it of violating the 1994 treaty. The complaint was dropped after a sustained public outcry, and Brazil reached accommodations with some of the giant drug makers.

Now, the Brazilian government says, the Doha declaration means that it no longer has anything to fear from such complaints.

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