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LONDON (Reuters) - Global attention is turning away from the AIDS epidemic at just the wrong time and means a fresh wave of the disease could infect millions of people in high-risk countries, a leading expert said on Friday.

Alan Whiteside, director of the health economics & HIV/AIDS research division (HEARD) at Kwazulu Natal University said many African countries, where the disease poses the biggest threat, were failing to implement long-term prevention measures and needed help to plan for the battle ahead.

The AIDS threat is still very real in places like Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi and South Africa, he said, and a sense that the international community is ticking it off as "dealt with" is highly risky.

"(Fighting) the AIDS epidemic had a huge amount of support for many years, but there seems to be a perception now that it has been dealt with and we can turn our attention to other issues.

"This is most emphatically not the case in a number of parts of the world. It is not appropriate to turn our backs on it," Whiteside told Reuters in a telephone interview from South Africa, where the disease kills an estimated 1,000 people a day.

Some 33.4 million people in the world have HIV, the sexually transmitted human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. Since AIDS emerged in the early 1980s, almost 60 million people have been infected and 25 million have died of HIV-related causes.

Sub-Saharan Africa is by far the worst affected region, accounting for 67 percent of people infected with HIV and 91 percent of all new infections in children, according to United Nations data.