ADDIS ABEBA, Jan 17, 2008 (AFP) - Ethiopia is implementing an action plan against AIDS that sets 2010 as a target for providing free retroviral drugs to all HIV-AIDS sufferers who need them, a senior health official said Thursday.

Meskele Lera, deputy director of the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office, said a number of other measures would be put into place as well, including wider use of condoms and more testing and awareness-raising.

"One hundred percent of the people in need will have free access to treatment by 2010," Lera told AFP at the launch in Addis Abeba of a multi-sector plan of action for preventing and treating AIDS.

"It is an ambitious target, but a necessary one," he said. "The Ethiopian government is committed to ensure universal and free access to treatment to all in need."

The main challenge was "to avert new new infections" in a country where -- according to a report from the World Bank in June -- the spread of HIV/AIDS is starting to decline.

"And for that, deep social transformations are needed," he said.

Retroviral drugs have been free in Ethiopia since 2005, but so far not everyone has been able to have access to them.

The east African nation is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a majority of its more than 80 million people living in the countryside.

The government estimates that 1.5 million Ethiopians have the HIV virus that leads to AIDS, while the World Health Organization puts the number at nearly 2.8 million. The first cases were officially recorded in 1986.

By 2010, the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office wants condom use in the sexually active 15-49 age group to grow from 10 percent last year to 60 percent.

Some 9.27 million people are meanwhile to undergo testing and counselling.

Eighty percent of pregnant women with HIV/AIDS are expected to receive mother-to-child treatment by 2010, while people getting retroviral treatment "will increase from 32 percent in 2007 to 100 percent by 2010".

The number of people benefitting from retroviral drugs is expected to grow from 140,000 at the end of last year to 397,000 in 2010, according to the action plan.

In addition, Ethiopia intends to set up more care and support centres, as well as local awareness-raising programmes with information centres in all schools plus universal access to basic health care beginning this year.

Worldwide, some 33.2 million people were living with HIV/AIDS in 2007, with by far the greatest number -- 22.5 million -- being in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a year-end report from the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS.

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