Today and tomorrow, December 14-15, the executive board of UNITAID will vote on whether to move forward with plans for a patent pool. A patent pool is a consortium of companies that share a license to a particular product or technology. In this case, manufacturers of AIDS drugs would give a limited number of generic manufacturers the right to produce those drugs. Competition between the generic manufacturers would then drive down the price of drugs in countries where many people currently cannot afford AIDS drugs.
Controversy has roiled over the patent pool idea since some have suggested that middle-income countries should be excluded. A lot of those countries are in Asia; see this letter from APN+, the network of people living with HIV in Asia, which clearly lays out the issues.
