AIDS experts urged Russian officials on Wednesday to scrap their abstinence-based strategy for curbing the spread of HIV, saying the country's fast-growing epidemic could be entering a dangerous new phase.

AIDS specialists meeting here urged Russia to adopt successful strategies like needle-exchange programmes and heroin substitutes such as methadone for drug addicts.

The number of HIV infections in Russia has doubled in the past eight years and there is evidence that in this region the virus is increasingly being spread by heterosexual sex.

Epidemic

The rapid growth of the epidemic in Russia is in contrast to sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, where prevalence of the virus fell during the same eight-year period, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS agency.

Russia's chief public-health officer, Gennady Onishchenko, told a regional AIDS conference Wednesday that Russia is "emphatically against" the use of drug replacement therapy. Meanwhile, he criticised programmes that exchange clean needles for used ones, saying such programmes may promote illicit drug sales and HIV transmission.

Both are part of a so-called harm-reduction strategy, in contrast to the just-say-no programmes that urge abstinence from drugs and risky sex. Russian health officials say they are committed overall to a "healthy lifestyles" rather than a harm-reduction approach to improving public health.

That isn't good enough, a number of foreign experts say.

"International studies show that an abstinence-based message on drug use or sex simply doesn't work," said Robin Gorna, executive director of the International AIDS Society. In Russia, she said, "It does appear that ideology is getting in the way of public health care policy."

Russia has increased spending on AIDS programmes by 33 times since 2006, making it a central part of an ambitious new national health-care strategy. It has expanded drug treatment dramatically for AIDS sufferers and is among the leaders worldwide in reducing the incidence of transmission of the disease between mothers and their babies.