BLANTYRE, Dec 1 (AFP) - President Bingu wa Mutharika wants to see at least one million Malawians going for voluntary HIV tests in 2005, he said at an event marking World AIDS Day on Wednesday.
The president said his government needed to know how many people in its 11-million population should get access to free anti-retroviral drugs.
"We want to put 80,000 on free anti-retrovirals by the end of 2005," Mutharika said at a ceremony in the central district of Mchinji, about 115 kilometres (70 miles) east of the administrative capital Lilongwe.
"Its ambitious and achievable... but this will depend on how many people will go for voluntary HIV tests as we need to test at least a million people next year."
Some 9,000 people have enrolled in Malawi's free anti-retroviral programme launched in May. Health officials estimate that only about three percent of the population have gone for voluntary HIV tests.
Mutharika, elected into power in the country's third democratic elections in May this year, said the country's biggest challenge was how to "control and manage the AIDS pandemic".
UNAIDS estimated that some 84,000 people died of AIDS in Malawi last year while about 14 percent of adults are infected with the virus ravaging southern Africa.
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