Born to an HIV-positive mother, she was abandoned at birth and is now destined to grow up in an orphanage.

In fact, the infant has a fair chance of perfect health, since two-thirds of children born of HIV-positive mothers are not themselves infected, although it will take doctors 18 months to make a definite diagnosis, said Yulia Vlastnaya, head of the hospital's child service.

Even so, the nameless, big-eyed baby has already been condemned to a childhood shut away from society. And "as is the case for all children kept in institutions," that in turn means slower development, Vlastnaya said.

There are 2,200 children in Moscow's hospital Number Two and Orphanage Number Seven who were abandoned by HIV-positive mothers. Of them, just 137 have been registered as HIV-positive.

But if tritherapy has made AIDS a manageable disease in rich countries, then Russia, which this year heads the G8 club of industrialised powers, continues to treat the problem as a dangerous taboo.

"The situation is relatively normal in Moscow, but in the regions it's very different. Doctors trade on the ignorance and shame of the infected women and encourage them to have abortions," explained Nina Skibnevskaya, director of Infoshare, a non-governmental organisation providing education on AIDS in Russia.

Those who avoid abortion "do not take care of themselves and abandon their children at birth, because they think they will die and so will the child," she added.

Russia acknowledges that it is far behind in fighting AIDS, with one of the world's largest increases of the epidemic, according to the United Nations organisation UNAIDS.

Igor Pshelin of Steps, another non-governmental organisation fighting AIDS, said this is the result of years of denial.

Nineteen years since the first AIDS case was registered, authorities list 335,000 HIV cases in Russia, although UNAIDS estimates the number to be at least 940,000, including 210,000 women.

For a long time, the principal victims were intravenous drug users. However, 30 to 50 percent of new cases are women, the health ministry says, adding that some 22,000 children born of HIV positive mothers have been officially registered.

The good news, experts say, is that the authorities are finally waking up to the problem.

President Vladimir Putin has put fighting infectious diseases, such as AIDS, at the top of the G8 agenda when leaders meet next month at a summit in Saint-Petersburg.

The 2006 budget includes 105 million dollars (83 million euros) for tackling AIDS, 20 times more than in 2005.

In a recent report, the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies warned that "terrible discrimination" against HIV-carriers in Russia was one of the most serious challenges.

Last month, parents of schoolchildren in a small provincial town near the city of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia protested against enrolling three HIV-positive children.

Even in Moscow, where the situation is incomparably better, children of infected mothers are often treated as pariahs.

At Special Centre Number Seven, two kilometers (1.2 miles) from the Kremlin, the children, of whom only a minority are contaminated, enjoy good treatment. But they are cocooned from the rest of society, almost as if they did not exist.

"The state does not know what to make of these children. No one wants them, neither adoptive families nor orphanages," Pshelin explained.

"Mentalities begin to change," the center's director Viktor Kreidich said. "Last year we managed to place four kids in an orphanage," he added. "But only after long negotiations."