Siberia, the stark place where Russian dissidents were once exiled, has become part of a region where a fast-growing HIV epidemic is being overlooked.

Five out of the 10 Russian territories with the highest HIV infection rates are east of the Ural Mountains, said Richard Day, a biostatistician in the Graduate School of Public Health,

He helped organize a workshop, which ends tomorrow, for public health experts from the Russian Federation and University of Pittsburgh researchers with the goal of developing collaborative HIV/AIDS projects east of the Urals.

According to Yevgeny Zvedre, a senior counselor at the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., the country has more than 307,000 HIV-positive people, of which almost 13,000 are children.

Three to four times as many could be infected with the AIDS virus, estimates the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, known as UNAIDS. Poor surveillance and public health infrastructure makes the official numbers unreliable, Day said.

"In the end, everybody is guessing," he said.

Much of Russia's share of global AIDS funding stays in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but HIV infection is soaring elsewhere in the nation, particularly the eastern part.

Almost 40,000 Siberians have been infected with HIV, said Dr. Galina Kalachyeva, head of the epidemiology department at the Siberian Center for AIDS Prevention in Omsk.

Infection from intravenous drug use increased rapidly after 1996 and more than three-quarters of HIV-positive Siberians are from 15 to 30 years old. In 1990, infected men outnumbered infected women 8 to 1, Kalchyeva said. Now, the ratio is nearly equal.

"This is what we see in Africa, for example," said Charles Rinaldo, a Pitt AIDS expert. "It says there's a lot of heterosexual spread of the virus going on, as well as the IV drug user spread in the Siberian region."

Children are getting HIV from their infected mothers, which has largely stopped in the United States with medication, he noted.

Adequate access to treatment drugs is a problem, said workshop organizer Linda Frank, executive director of the Pennsylvania MidAtlantic AIDS Education and Training Center. She just returned from a visit to the region.

There are almost 6,000 HIV-positive people in Vladivostic, but only 200 are getting antiretroviral drugs to combat the infection, Frank said.

"In many ways it's like it was in the United States ... before we had any medicine," she said.

The workshop is open to the public today. It will be held at the university's Posvar Hall, Room 2500. For more information, call 412-624-4077.