Russia is on the brink of an AIDS catastrophe, experts say, that could lead to infection rates rarely seen outside sub-Saharan Africa

Russia is on the brink of an AIDS catastrophe, experts say, that could lead to infection rates rarely seen outside sub-Saharan Africa. And the government is doing next to nothing to avert the disaster. The nation of 146 million people has the fastest growing epidemic of HIV infection in the world, the United Nations AIDS program reported last month, with a particularly dramatic rise among heterosexuals practicing unsafe sex. If the infection continues to grow at its current rate, more than 5 million Russians could have HIV by 2007, said Vadim Pokrovsky, Russia's top AIDS researcher and director of the Moscow-based Center for AIDS Prevention and Treatment. But the government devotes a mere $5 million to HIV treatment annually - a sum that Pokrovsky and other health experts say is laughably small - compared with more than $5 billion spent by the United States. He says $65 million is needed immediately for programs to prevent and treat HIV. But it is not only the government that is guilty of inaction. On the subject of AIDS, the whole country is in denial. The official statistics are startling enough: According to government figures, HIV infections leaped from about 87,000 cases in 2000 to more than 201,000 cases now. Since 1997, the infection rate has increased by more than 500 percent. The real numbers may be much higher. UNAIDS estimates there are 700,000 HIV cases. Pokrovsky believes it is closer to 1.4 million.