MOSCOW, Dec 1 (AFP) - Russian experts marked Wednesday's World AIDS Day with warnings that galloping rates of infection by the life-threatening disease could only be tackled by urgent government action.

Declaring that an AIDS epidemic blighting Russia was more important for the population than war in Chechnya, the head of the country's AIDS centre on Tuesday said that infections had risen by over 100 percent in each of the last three years.

"We ought to think that we are all infected," declared the centre's chief Vadim Pokrovsky in a press conference on the eve of World AIDS Day, marked each year on December 1.

Health ministry figures have shown that while levels of infection in Russia remain low compared to several other countries, the life-threatening immunodeficiency disease is spreading with alarming speed.

Over 23,500 cases of HIV infection, the virus that can lead to full-blown AIDS, have been officially recorded since 1987 -- a startling jump from the figure of only 2,617 reported by authorities three years ago.

In 1999 alone, 12,500 new cases appeared, including more that 7,000 in metropolitan Moscow.

Pokrovsky warned that actual rates of infection could well be even higher, estimating that around 123,000 further cases have gone unreported by Russia's cash-starved health system.

Current figures show that 33.6 million people around the world have been infected by the virus.

Russian experts argue that infections are no longer limited to people considered to be high-risk -- namely homosexuals, prostitutes, and intravenous drug-users -- but have spread to other parts of the population.

The plight of HIV and AIDS sufferers has been made worse, Pokrovsky added, by the dire financial straits of Russia's healthcare system and a lack of appropriate medicine.

A law passed by the country's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, places reponsibility for the funding of AIDS treatment on local authorities, many of which are unable to fork out up to 20,000 dollars a year to pay for the costly medicines.

One locally produced medicine for carriers of the HIV virus, Fosfasit, costs an estimated 10,000 dollars a year for each person treated, and has to be complemented after several years of infection by imported medication.

To spread the message of safe-sex, the Health Ministry has organized a concert in Moscow to mark World AIDS Day. "Young people don't like listening to their parents, (but) they can easily listen to pop singers," said Deputy Health Minister Gennady Onishchenko.

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