MOSCOW, Nov 16 (AFP) - Russia is sitting on an AIDS time-bomb with the number of people carrying the HIV virus which causes the disease likely to spiral out of control unless urgent action is taken, a top UN official said Thursday.

Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, issued this stark warning at an international conference to discuss measures to combat the alarming spread of AIDS in Russia, which has the world's fastest-growing number of new carriers.

"The Russian Federation is facing an explosive HIV situation. At the end of last year 130,000 were infected with HIV. By the end of 2000, there will be 300,000, more than a doubling in just one year," he said.

Piot conceded that less than one percent of Russia's population is infected with HIV, but added: "What matters is the rate of growth."

In October nearly 1,000 new infections were detected in Russia's second city Saint Petersburg, a statistic that Piot described as "really very worrisome."

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Gennady Onishchenko told the conference that the government was concerned about the spread of the disease.

But he pointed to a lack of funds for supporting programmes to educate Russians about safe sex and the dangers of sharing needles for intravenous drug use.

"Russian society is not sufficiently aware of the problem of AIDS. Some governors even think it's a non-existent problem, something just invented," Onishchenko added.

Piot warned that if the spread of HIV continued at the present rate, the number of cases in Russia would increase tenfold. "And then we can really talk about a major epidemic," he said.

UNAIDS announced that it would be joining forces with the Russian health ministry and the World Bank (WB) to fight the spread of AIDS throughout Russia's 11 times zones.

A WB representative said the Bank hoped to negotiate a 150 million dollar loan to the Russian government at the beginning of next year as part of a "multi-pronged effort" to avert the AIDS crisis.

Announcing the loan, the Bank's Russia representative, Michael Carter, said the country was fortunate because it had diagnosed the AIDS problem at an early stage of development.

"AIDS is a serious problem among young people, so really it's a problem for Russia's future," he said.

The World Bank loan will help sponsor education and preventative programmes among drug users, commercial sex workers and the prison population, which he described as the "vulnerable groups," in addition to a number of treatment programmes.

Nearly 40,000 Russians have contracted HIV since the beginning of the year, the UN's Moscow office announced Wednesday, with the number of registered cases rising from 61,240 to 69,120 in October alone.

The sufferers are mainly young people aged between 18 and 25, and about 90 percent are drug users. About 7,000 cases have been registered among Russia's jail population.

The World Health Organization recently issued a warning about the spread of AIDS in Russia, saying the real number of HIV sufferers was 10 times that indicated by official statistics.

If the spread of the virus continues unchecked, Russia will count more than a million HIV-positive people within two or three years, Vladimir Pokrovsky, the head of the National Centre for the Fight against AIDS, told Moscow's Echo radio on Wednesday.

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