"We must leave Dublin with an action plan to fight HIV/AIDS in our region," Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, whose nation holds rotating European Union presidency, said in an opening address to the two-day gathering.

"This Dublin conference must send out a clear message. HIV/AIDS is a potent threat to our young people."

Ahern also warned that people must not "delude themselves that HIV/AIDS was exclusively an African problem," referring to the continent which has been hit hardest by the virus.

"Such a mistaken view is unjust and unfair to our African partners. It is also dangerous as it encourages complacency and inaction in our own region.

"Explosive rates of HIV/AIDS are also being recorded outside of Africa, including in Europe and Central Asia," Ahern told the conference entitled "Breaking the barriers - a partnership to fight HIV/AIDS in Europe and Central Asia".

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan warned in a message to the gathering that 80 percent of those infected in Eastern Europe with the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, are young.

Ignoring this would be a "deadly mistake", he said.

"No nation can afford to see its future workers and leaders struck down by AIDS before they reach maturity."

Eastern Europe and Central Asia were seeing AIDS spread at the most rapid rate of anywhere in the world, the conference was told.

In 1998, only 30,000 people were infected in the two regions against 1.5 million now, according to a report by Peter Piot, the executive director of UNAIDS, the United Nations body tackling the disease.

Before the conference opened, Piot warned that the enlargement of the European Union on May 1 could risk seeing this swift advance in HIV infection moving further west into Europe.

UNAIDS has called on EU governments to do more to help the 10 mainly former Soviet Bloc nations joining the community to tackle the spread of the virus.

"In the new EU, this should be one of the priorities," Piot told BBC Radio.

"Fighting AIDS is something that benefits not only the population of the countries it is done in, but also their neighbours, because the viruses don't need a visa and don't respect borders.

"It is clear that expansion of the EU is not only about free markets and political union, but also about social aspects."

On May 1, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia will join the EU, along with Mediterranean island states Cyprus and Malta.

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TERRA.WIRE