AIDS in Africa: Life, Death and Property Rights

In the final years of the twentieth century, the world was hit by a plague of epidemic proportions--the plague of AIDS, a life-threatening disease that remained stubbornly immune to any cure or vaccine. In the developed nations of the West, AIDS was slowly brought under control through a combination of education, prevention, and cutting-edge medicines. But in the developing world, where health care expenditures were often paltry, AIDS continued to rampage. By the year 2000, 25 million people in Africa alone were infected with the disease. Millions had already died.

For the pharmaceutical industry, the plague of AIDS was compounded by a unique, and baffling set of problems. Nearly all of the medicines were expensive to produce and often difficult to administer. They demanded levels of income and structures of distribution that often were sorely lacking in the developing world. Yet the growing tragedy of the disease had raised a public outcry for a solution. And the pharmaceutical companies were in the center of the storm. Increasingly, activist groups were demanding that the companies respond to the AIDS epidemic with drastic measures, giving their drugs away for free or abandoning the patent rights that had long protected their intellectual property. It had become painfully obvious that the pharmaceutical firms needed to respond to their critics. The question was, how?