Kampala — Five per cent of pregnant women in villages take HIV/Aids tests because the majority fear retribution from their husbands if they go for the tests, the Director General of Uganda Aids Commission, Dr Kihumuro Apuuli, has said.

Kihumuro was speaking at the 13th World Aids Day celebrations in Kampala on Wednesday. He said that some women who have proposed to their husbands to go for HIV/Aids tests have been threatened with divorce.

"In some centres, instead of the HIV prevalence rate going down, it is going up yet we know Aids awareness in Uganda is nearly 100 per cent," Kihumuro said.

"Our findings show that only five per cent of women in rural areas accepted to have voluntary HIV/Aids testing," he said.

He said about one million Ugandans have died of Aids since the scourge was first detected in Uganda in 1982 in a remote village in Rakai district.

He said it has left about two million orphans in the country.

The current national HIV prevalence rates stands at about 4.1 per cent but about 6.2 per cent particularly among pregnant women.

Kihumuro said out of about 1.2 million Ugandans living with HIV, 100,000 urgently need anti-retroviral drugs but only 25,000 have access to ARVs.

According to an Africa Medical Research Foundation (Amref) report on HIV/Aids control among commercial sex workers and their clients in Kawempe Division in Kampala city, the prevalence rate is at 20.4%.

The Amref' report contains findings of a six-month HIV/Aids surveillance on slums in Kawempe.

According to a Ministry of Health report of June last year, 75,290 Ugandans died of Aids in 2002 and nearly the same number of new infections were reported.

"Since there has not been any other report, we can only give crude estimates that we have lost 100,000 people to Aids (in 2003)," Elioda Tumwesigye, the chairman of the parliamentary committee on the HIV/Aids Committee said.