MOSCOW, Dec 1 (AFP) - Russia marked World AIDS days Friday with alarm at its unpreparedness to combat the rapid spread of HIV in a country where Soviet taboos still hamper efforts to educate people about sexually-related diseases.

"The rate of growth of HIV in Russia is unprecedented. It is worse than in African countries," said the country's leading expert on the disease, Vadim Pokrovsky, in an interview with Izvestia newspaper.

Povroksky, head of the government-run National Centre for the Fight against AIDS, warns that if the spread of the virus continues unchecked, Russia will count more than a million HIV-positive people within two or three years.

This year, the state is due to allocate 44 million rubles (1.6 million dollars, 1.8 million euros) to finance the fight against Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

Most of the money is being spent on medical tests to diagnose new sufferers of the Human Immune-deficiency Virus (HIV) that causes the disease and the rest "will not even cover the treatment of 50 patients," Pokrovsky asserted this week.

Russia would need to spend 65 million dollars to organise a campaign to inform the public about safe sex and prevent the spread of the HIV virus, according to the expert.

At the end of November, 71,500 Russians were officially registered as suffering from HIV. Nearly 40,000 have contracted the virus since the beginning of the year, according to government statistics.

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 figures.

Top Russian officials insist that the government is concerned about the spread of the disease.

But Deputy Prime Minister Gennady Onishchenko pointed recently 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 said.

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 rapid growth of HIV has dismayed health experts in a country where until 1996 only 100 to 200 new HIV cases were registered officially each year.

Russia's chronically underfunded health system also lacks the means to provide the hugely expensive treatment necessary to treat the virus that leads to AIDS.

Hospitalised two weeks ago for blood-poisoning in Moscow's only anti-AIDS clinic, Yelena, a 23-year-old HIV-positive drug addict, complained like many other patients that she is only being treated for secondary illnesses.

"The centre lacks medecines, even the most basic, and the doctors ask patients to buy them themselves," said Yelena, who dreams of joining relatives abroad where she can "get proper care."

Treatment for HIV requires a combination of three antiviral drugs and costs nearly 800 dollars a month. According to Russian law, all sufferers of the virus must be treated free.

"I come regularly to the centre for tests, but the doctors tell me every time my immune defficiency does not yet require treatment, said Alexei, a drug user aged 26 who also suffers from hepatitus and herpes,

"I am becoming weaker every day," he added.

In a small glimmer of light, a sharp increase in Western aid should soon be available to bolster anti-AIDS measures in Russia.

The World Bank hopes 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 with the Russian health ministry and the United Nations.

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