By Simon Gardner

COLOMBO, Aug 21 (Reuters) - HIV infections are increasing at a worrying 10 percent a year in the Asia Pacific region, a top UN AIDS official said on Tuesday, putting the rise down to intravenous drug use, sex workers and conflicts.

Governments need to spend more money on prevention programmes and look at bypassing patents to produce affordable generic drugs to ensure prevalence rates remain low compared to Africa, said Prasada Rao, UNAIDS regional director for Asia and the Pacific.

"In the last two years we have seen about a million infections coming in, that means half a million every year," Rao told Reuters in an interview at the International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific being hosted in Colombo. "Ten percent is a worrying figure."

"If you take out Southern India and Thailand and Cambodia, where you have a declining rate, in the remaining Asia Pacific region it is still an increasing epidemic," he added. "It is still accelerating."

UNAIDS estimates 5.4 million people were living with HIV in the Asia Pacific region in 2006, with anywhere between 140,000 and 610,000 people dying from AIDS-related illnesses.

That makes it the world's second largest number of people living with HIV after sub-Saharan Africa, where 25.8 million people are infected with the virus.

Part of the challenge is changing the mindset of policy makers who, though not complacent, are not targetting enough prevention measures at high risk groups, Rao said.

"It is an epidemic which is spreading through the injecting drug users, sexworkers ... who are criminalised sections of society," he said.

"When you explain the dynamic of the epidemic to politicians, they still think it is something that is not going to happen here and is only going to happen to bad people."

Areas of most acute concern to UNAIDS include Papua New Guinea because of poor health infrastructure and a high prevalence of rape, and Indonesia, Vietnam, China and Bangladesh, where intravenous drug use is high.

"In South Asia it is Pakistan and North India -- Pakistan because still the entire dimension of the epidemic is not well understood. Northern India's response is very slow and very disjointed," Rao said, adding some Indian states had even banned sex education.

India has between 2.0 million to 3.1 million people with HIV, with 85 percent of transmission occurring through sex workers. In China, 60 percent of infections are due to injecting drug use, he said.

Human trafficking for the sex industry is also a major problem.

"A lot of Nepali girls are brought to India. Another trafficking route has been Thailand and its neighbouring countries like Laos, Cambodia and even Myanmar," Rao said. "Many young girls are coming to brothels and massage parlours ... many just 13, 14 or 15 years old."

Nepal's AIDS programmes were suffering due to political instability there, just as conflict in Afghanistan is hindering access to treatment and prevention.

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