Kampala, Aug 17 (DPA) Rosemary Bagagga, a penniless AIDS sufferer, is five months pregnant, but what worries her most is that she may not be able to get the drugs she needs to keep her alive.

Two months ago, nurses at a clinic just outside the Ugandan capital Kampala told the 32-year-old mother-of-three and dozens of others that antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) at the health facility had run out.

'I lost hope and fainted,' she told DPA.

'We were warned that we have to be ready for the worst because there may be a total cut off of the drug supplies in the future.'

In recent weeks, some of the 362 health facilities providing ARVs have turned away patients while others have stopped registering new patients altogether.

The government is probing claims that 17 people died during the past two months in the northern district of Kitgum due to lack of treatment.

The East African nation has been one of the world's worst-hit by the AIDS epidemic, losing around a million people to the disease since the early 1980s. Around 1.3 million people are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Uganda reduced the infection rates from almost 30 percent in the early 1990s to the current 6.4 percent, but numbers of new infections have increased in recent years.

The government announced recently that due to the current global economic crisis, donors such as the Global Fund to fight Malaria, TB and AIDS and the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) had warned that funds to procure the drugs might be reduced in the future.

However, the Global Fund in early August announced that it had given Uganda over $4 million for ARVs.