HIV infection in Australia rose by at least 50 per cent in the past 10 years ending in 2011, a new report said, indicating too that last year alone, Aussies diagnosed with the AIDS-causing virus spiked by more than eight per cent.

As of the last count, 35,000 individuals in the country were living with HIV, which if neglected and mismanaged by afflicted patients could develop into full-blown AIDS that easily would weaken a person's immune system.

That advanced stage of the disease, medical doctors said, is when serious health complications set in, which they added are the cause of deaths among AIDS patients.

According to Associate Professor David Wilson, chief of the Kirby Institute's Surveillance and Evaluation Program for Public Health at the University of New South Wales, an estimated 10,000 Aussies are considered as unregistered HIV cases, meaning they have been living with the deadly virus without knowing it.

As in previous cases since AIDS became a global health scourge, the spread of HIV, in Australia at least, has been attributed to risky lifestyle choices - unprotected sex and drug use, Prof Wilson said.

Based on the yearly surveillance report of HIV cases, data of which was released on Wednesday, 72 per cent of known HIV infections from 2007 through 2011 were connected to homosexual contacts while another 16 per cent were due to heterosexual encounters.

Only two per cent, Prof Wilson said, were blamed on drug abuse, in which the virus in contacted when persons share injection needles.

The rise in HIV cases, which were more noticeable in NSW, South Australia and Victoria, effectively disproved earlier assumptions by health experts in the country that AIDS had reached its peak in Australia following the medical scare it caused in the late 1980s.

"We were starting to think we had reached a point where it would flatten out ... but over the last year we have realised it has jumped again," Prof Wilson told The Australian on Wednesday.

In response to the rebound of HIV cases, anti-AIDS advocates will launch today the so-called 'Melbourne Declaration', a four-point plan that essentially outlines effective measures that hopefully would turn back whatever 'gains' collected by the deadly virus in the last half-decade.

Among the steps espoused by the plan are the speedy regulatory approval of AIDS-testing kit that can be purchased over the counter and administer at home, the downward revision in immunity threshold required by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme prior to extending drug subsidies to HIV patients and the availability of HIV-prevention drugs to individuals considered as high risk for the AIDS virus.

Prof Wilson, however, has a serious misgiving about home-testing for HIV infection, insisting that such recourse would leave the government in the dark on the true state of AIDS cases in the country.

Bur more pressing, according to Rob Lake of the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations, is the need to stem the spread of HIV, telling ABC that fresh data indicating alarming in infection last year is "a concern for us and that's why strategies to encourage testing are so important."

Professor John de Wit of the National Centre in HIV Social Research added that a concerted national effort must be put in place "to start driving chlamydia and gonorrhoea numbers down," which he noted were other sexually transmitted diseases that also shot up in parallel with Australia's recorded AIDS cases.