LUSAKA, Sept 15 (AFP) - The chief of the UN Children Fund (UNICEF) on Wednesday challenged western and African governments to find means to fight the "undeclared war" AIDS has declared in Africa, ravaging the continent.

"The HIV/AIDS pandemic is the most terrible undeclared war in the world, with the whole of sub-Saharan Africa a killing field," UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy told an international conference in Lusaka.

Bellamy warned that the scourge of the disease would soon make orphans of many more African children. She spoke out against the inequalities in spending to fight AIDS in developed countries and in the worst affected continent.

While the United States spent 880 million dollars a year in the face of 40,000 new HIV infections domestically, the whole of Africa was left to handle at least four million new HIV cases with a mere 149-160 million dollars, she told the 11th conference on AIDS and sexually-transmitted diseases in Africa.

"If the international community is to come to grips with HIV/AIDS, it must eliminate the staggering inequities and inequalities that are contributing to the spread of the pandemic - along with many other consequences of global poverty," Bellamy said.

Just as the international community and Africa worked tirelessly on peace efforts to end war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Bellamy said the AIDS crisis deserved the same attention.

"We must ratchet up the fight against HIV/AIDS to that same level of intensity and public visibility," Bellamy said.

More than eight million children have been orphaned and the total number is expected to reach 13 million by the year 2000, the majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where they suffer stigmatisation, according to UNICEF.

"Decades of gains of child survival ... are being wiped out threatening the prospects of social progress," Bellamy said.

She said problems that communities faced in trying to cope with the Human Immune-deficiency Virus and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome were enormous and further worsened if a substantial proportion of those orphans were also sick.

Although a study carried out in Zambia and released at the conference showed that the majority of poor families were able to look after their orphans, compared to rich ones, the ability to cope is fast being stretched to the limit.

"We are seeing the traditional African way of relying on the extended family to care for children orphaned by AIDS is becoming increasingly untenable," Bellamy said.

Oprhans who do not have satisfactory resources end up on the streets and in Zambia alone, it is estimated that half of the 75,000 to 90,000 street children are estimated to be mostly orphans.

While around two percent of the child population in developing countries globally was orphaned before the advent of AIDS, the current rates range from 11 percent of all children in Uganda and nine percent in Zambia. The pandemic swept east Africa in the 1980s, prior to programmes to help fight it, but is on current figures at its worst in southern African countries.

The symposium -- which has gathered thousands of scientists, delegates from the United Nations and non-governmental organisations, representatives of international finance bodies, other experts and decision-makers in the Zambian capital -- began on Sunday and is due to end on Thursday.

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