Even as India and the US have agreed to jointly combat HIV/AIDS at the global level, a top UN official said there are no good estimates about how many people die in India due to the disease every year.

"One of the blind spots in India is that there is no good estimate of how many people die of AIDS although we have a reasonable estimate of how many are living with it," Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), said during a teleconference.

Answering a question from on whether in a country where many more people die from other ailments than AIDS, there was enough political will to take on the challenge, Piot said: "AIDS is an epidemic. In India most people were infected fairly recently. It takes five to 10 years without treatment for those infected to die.

"There are districts where two to four percent of the population is HIV-positive. When you reach that kind infection rate, it is quite serious," he said.

According to estimates five million Indians are HIV-positive. The spread of AIDS has been described as the most serious impending health crisis in the country.

However, there are groups in India that argue that even road accidents kill many more people than AIDS and much more attention is being paid to the disease because it has some high profile advocates.

However, experts like Piot counter the argument by saying the real impact of the problem in terms of mortality rate would be felt five to 10 years from now.

"Dealing with AIDS should be a top concern. Clearly not enough is done in most states," he said.

Piot noted some states like Tamil Nadu had seen a decline in the infection rate. The problem of data accuracy, he said, was more pronounced in northern states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar than in southern states.

According to UNAIDS, Asia and Pacific have more than eight million people living with HIV - the second largest after sub-Saharan Africa.

It said if the countries of the region treat the problem as "business as usual", an additional 12 million people would be infected in the next five years.