William Aldis was agitated. As the World Health Organisation’s top man in Thailand, he knew Thai officials were hosting their US counterparts in the northern city of Chiang Mai to negotiate what to many outsiders might seem an entirely worthy objective: a bi­lateral free-trade deal. But he saw dangers – and decided to make his views public.

The “lives of hundreds of thousands of Thai citizens” would be put at risk if negotiators accepted Washington’s demands for greater protection of drug companies’ intellectual property rights, he wrote in an article for a Bangkok newspaper.