ISTANBUL, Dec 1 (AFP) - The Turkish government has revealed that 1,067 people in the country are suffering from the human immuno-deficiency virus, HIV - but the true impact of AIDS remains unclear.

To mark World AIDS Day, the health ministry issued the figures but said that "precise statistics were impossible to collect" and no deaths from AIDS had been reported "because families are often at odds with the doctors over the cause of death of their loved ones".

However, an unofficial estimate, by the non-governmental Association to fight AIDS (ASD), revealed that 80 people died from the disease between 1985 and December 1997. ASD spokesman Erhan Cetin told AFP he could not understand why the government had "forgotten" this statistic.

He added that the government had seriously underestimated the number of people living with the virus, saying that realistically the official tally should be multiplied by between 30 and 50.

Health Minister Osman Durmas has launched an anti-AIDS campaign with the slogan "men can make a difference." In Turkey, there are 2.5 times more men than women living with HIV.

"Men have more sexual partners and extra-marital relations than women and represent the majority of drug addicts," he explained.

Heterosexual sex has caused 49 percent of disclosed HIV cases in Turkey, according to the minister.

The number of newly-reported cases is rising, with 74 new instances occurring in the first six months of 2000, against 119 for the whole of 1999.

At the end of June, 340 of the 1,067 disclosed HIV-positive cases had developed full-blown AIDS, according to a press release from Istanbul-province Health director Osman Karaaslan.

Sixty percent of those infected live in Istanbul province, the report showed. Seventy-six percent are aged between 20 and 49 and 47 percent were foreign women, the press release states.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Istanbul has been a magnet for prostitutes from Romania, Ukraine, Moldova and Russia, as prostitution is not regulated.

Some 12 million people live in Istanbul, the largest city in Turkey.

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