People with AIDS in the former Soviet Union, Eastern and Southern European countries have limited access to AIDS medications as well. Over ninety percent of the world's HIV-infected people live in these regions of the world. Millions of people are dying because of the lack of access to affordable medicines. Intellectual property rights are legal mechanisms whose ultimate goal is to provide incentives to private industry to make products or processes available to the public. A patent is not an absolute right nor an end in itself.
Health is an end in itself.
Intellectual property protections for pharmaceuticals should always promote and be consistent with public health goals. The health of many people in the world is enhanced by local knowledge of indigenous medicinal plants. This knowledge is intellectual property which is community owned. Yet there is no provision in intellectual property agreements to protect this knowledge or medicinal plants from exploitation by the multinational pharmaceutical industry and from disappearance from the local communities that utilize them. Compulsory licensing and parallel importing of medicines are important tools for drug importing nations to increase the availability of medicines and to reduce their costs.