By Robert Evans

GENEVA, Mar 28 (Reuters) - The United Nations health agency WHO and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will pool ideas to try to make it easier to bring cheaper treatments for disease to poor countries, officials said on Wednesday.

The programme will be set in motion at a meeting on the drug issue--now at the focus of international attention due to a court case in South Africa--at a meeting of trade and health experts in Norway next month.

"We are looking for a win-win situation....There seems to be a growing acceptance of the principle of differential pricing," Dr Jonathan Quick, who heads the WHO's unit for essential drugs and medicines, told a news briefing.

WTO officials also indicate they see differential pricing--charging lower prices for patented drugs in poorer countries--as one way to tackle the problem, which has brought fierce criticism of the Geneva-based body from some activist groups.

The attacks by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) focussing on development issues have centred on the WTO's intellectual property agreement, or TRIPS, under which the 140 nations in the body agree to protect patent rights.

A statement from the WTO said the meeting in the Norwegian town of Hosbjor from April 8 to 11 "will explore how to achieve public health objectives within the framework of WTO trade and intellectual property rules."

The WHO's Quick said the agency's studies of the 1994 TRIPs accord, now also criticised by some developing countries who helped negotiate and signed it, was not a barrier to getting vital drugs at affordable prices onto Third World markets.

"Within the TRIPS agreement there are ways to make drugs cheaper in the poorest countries," he declared.

And he said it was not inevitable, as some NGOs assert, that the pact would make the price of essential medicines, like the latest treatments for the AIDS scourge sweeping Africa, more expensive in the less well-off nations.

"Prices were already high there before the TRIPS agreement," said Quick, whose chief at WHO, former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, is campaigning hard on the cheaper drugs issue.

Under TRIPS, there are provisions for countries facing a major health problem to compel foreign companies to license local production of their patented drugs, or for the import of so-called generics, which are legal copies of those drugs.

Several WTO member states, especially India, are big producers of generics because TRIPS allowed such activities until the end of 2004 in countries where no domestic patent law on production methods existed before the accord.

But developing countries and NGOs say the court case brought by 39 leading international drug companies against the South African government, which has moved to ease import of generics and the local production of patented drugs, could undermine those provisions.

Together with a complaint by the United States to the WTO against similar measures by Brazil in its campaign against AIDS, they say, the currently suspended action in South Africa could, if successful, unleash a wide legal offensive by the big firms.

Many of the drug companies have signalled they would be ready to work for differential pricing as long as effective measures were in place to prevent cheaper medicines being re-exported from poor countries back to rich ones.

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