With increasing concern that an impending free trade agreement between the European Union and India could threaten the world’s supply of generic antiretroviral drugs, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has cowritten a new brief to help countries access the cheaper drugs. The brief explains how to use The World Trade Organization’s Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to override patents for drugs needed for public and health purposes. Few developing countries had exercised this right, according to UNAIDS, because doing so requires complicated legal paperwork.

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