Traditional medicine to be promoted

Thailand will spend $71.4 million over the next five years to promote the use of Thai traditional medicines over imported pharmaceuticals which now cost the country $9.5 billion a year, health officials said Sunday.

Thailand's Deputy Public Health Minister Morakot Kornkasem said the cabinet had approved a 2.5 billion baht ($71.4 million) budget to promote the use of Thai traditional medicines and raise their manufacturing standards, said the Thai News Agency.

The program aims to boost the use of traditional medicines to at least 25 per cent of the market to reduce Thailand's dependence on imported medications and technology, Morakot said.

He warned that newly developed medicines by western pharmaceutical giants are likely to be protected by longer-duration patents, up to 25 years from the current 20-year period, and predicted that such medicines would be marketed at comparatively high prices, making traditional medicines a necessary alternative.

Thailand's health ministry earlier this year irked the international pharmaceutical industry by issuing "compulsory licensing" for generic versions of two anti-HIV/AIDs drugs and one blood-thinning medicine, to make the life-saving medicines more accessible to the poor under its subsidized health care system.
source:www.bangkokpost.com