The past decade has seen remarkable progress in the fight against AIDS with many new treatments discovered and more in development. Some people in the public health community now say that AIDS could be reclassified as a chronic disease that is manageable like diabetes or hypertension. Until recently, such thoughts were unimaginable.

Despite this progress in treatment, 2.5 million people will be infected with HIV this year and more than two million will die of AIDS. As long as weak infrastructure and disastrous political interference plague poor countries where the disease hits hardest, AIDS will persist.

Frustrated global activists are now demanding that developing countries be allowed to revoke the patents on AIDS medications to make them more available. Already, the pharmaceutical industry funds philanthropic many programs to make medicines available in these countries at little or no cost. But activists want to impose "compulsory licensing," a practice endorsed by the World Trade Organization, to allow governments to break patents during public health emergencies to produce copies of branded drugs.

This may sound like an effective way to get antiretroviral drugs to the world's poor, but it isn't. In fact, it could have deadly consequences.

The immediate danger would come from the proliferation of low-quality counterfeits. Most local industries in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia lack the technological and regulatory incentives to produce high-quality pharmaceuticals. When a drug is manufactured in a facility that doesn't meet international safety standards, the drug may contain the wrong dosage of medication. If an AIDS patient takes medicine that isn't strong enough to kill the disease, the virus becomes drug resistant. Exposing HIV/AIDS patients to substandard products worsens the epidemic and increases treatment costs.

In 2005, for example, many AIDS patients in Thailand suffered and died after treatment with an untested antiretroviral cocktail called GPO-vir, produced by Thailand's Government Pharmaceutical Organization. Despite this failure, many activists support the Thai government's efforts to copy other antiretroviral drugs developed by pharmaceutical companies.

In addition to this awful death toll, patent violations could lead to a decline in the number of new vaccines in the future, since drug companies would have no assurance of a return on their investments. On average, it takes more than ten years and $800 million to bring a new drug to market. No company could afford that cost if international patent theft made it impossible to recoup the investment. It's a simple concept -- as patent protection wanes, so does the incentive to produce vital new drugs.

Most activists who support compulsory licensing actually recognize this. But their solution is highly flawed.

They want to replace the patent system with "prizes" for drug discoveries and "patent pools" that subsidize investments and projected returns. But could government experts really determine an accurate value for such a prize that would incentivize continued research? Very unlikely.

Neither drug companies nor AIDS patients can afford a slowdown in the market-driven innovation process that has characterized past AIDS research. Market incentives have brought about 90 HIV/AIDS drugs to patients in the past two decades, with more in development. An artificial market managed by bureaucrats and one-dimensional activists will retard this trend, if not end it.

Stopping the spread of AIDS is difficult. But the solution is not to demonize those private companies trying to find cures or remove their incentive to develop new treatments. Rather, activists, politicians, and business leaders must work together to address institutional problems -- such as dysfunctional public health systems and bad governance -- that have made the AIDS crisis difficult to combat.

Grace-Marie Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a non-profit research organization focusing on free-market solutions to health reform. She can be reached at P.O. Box 320010, Alexandria, VA, or at turner@galen.org.