Tanzania plans to sharply increase the number of HIV patients receiving life-prolonging medicines by the end of this year with the help of donors, the health minister said on Thursday.

About 12 to 15 percent of Tanzanian adults are infected with HIV, while 200,000 of them are in acute need of antiretroviral therapy (ART) or medicines that slow the progress of AIDS, U.N. statistics show.

Health Minister Anna Abdallah said the government had 4,000 people on ART by the end of 2004 at a cost of $2 million.

“We hope to reach 44,000 by the end of this year,” she said in an interview.

“The total number of patients we wish to reach is 500,000 by 2008. We have other stakeholders who are helping us.”

Abdallah said her department had ordered drugs worth $3.5 million for the current year and had received a similar amount of money from Canada to purchase more drugs.

The ministry and the American embassy on Wednesday signed an agreement for the procurement and distribution of antiretrovirals drugs under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar).

The east African country received $49 million in 2004 under Pepfar and officials at the American embassy say it has requested $80 million for 2005.

The price of the medicines has come down sharply in the last few years but most Tanzanians who survive on less than a dollar a day cannot afford them.

Abdallah added that there had been an increase in the rate of tuberculosis (TB) infection in the country, a sign that HIV infection is escalating.

“Our worry is that the number (of TB patients) is on the increase. It was 19,000 in 1995; it has reached 65,665 in 2003,” she said.

Another 63,687 were reported in 2004 in 19 of the country’s 26 regions. “Sixty percent of the patients are HIV positive, it is an indicator that prevalence is growing.”

The government spends 34,000 shillings ($30) for drugs to treat one patient over a period of eight months.

“This is a dangerous situation, if the society does not take precautionary steps, the situation will only get worse,” Abdallah said.