The church has emerged as a major obstacle in the Caribbean's fight against AIDS by not taking a realistic approach to the killer disease, according to AIDS researchers in the region.

"The church really wants messages going out congratulating itself in the fight,'' head of the Barbados National Advisory Committee on AIDS Dr. E.R.

(Mickey) Walrond told a Caribbean Epidemiology Centre workshop on AIDS and the media. "It does not really want young people to adopt safe sex by condom use in spite of all the evidence showing that use of condoms does not promote promiscuity.

"Basically, the church really doesn't want you to prevent sexual transmission of diseases unless you are doing it on their terms -- abstinence, which is unrealistic.'' Educational psychologist Dr. Brader Brathwaite, the director of Jamaica's STD clinic, said it was her information that "AIDS and STDS have infiltrated every devout religious denomination in the Caribbean''.

"This feature would no doubt challenge the premise that AIDS and STDS are punishment from God,'' she said.

"Together we should be seen as partners in health education. But religious leaders do not always show compassion for persons with AIDS -- they remind them of how supposedly sinful they have been. Looking into this area we find many groups preferring to be associated with prevention and not the plight of the HIV-positive person.'' Using a condom during sexual intercourse was vital in the AIDS battle, Dr.

Walrond said.

But in the Caribbean, where HIV was primarily being spread through heterosexual relations, many people in AIDS education were regular churchgoers and thus took the church's position that abstinence until marriage was the best way to prevent HIV infection.

In Jamaica, the church's stance is evident in the fact condoms are hidden away behind the counter in pharmacies so they are not freely accessibly.

"Condom access needs to improve considerably,'' Jamaica's Principal Medical Officer for Epidemiology Dr. Peter Figueroa said. "Many Caribbean countries, especially their religious communities, have reservations about how openly the promotion of condom use should be.'' In Jamaica, there had not been major opposition to condom promotion, he noted.

However, the position of the church was that condoms should not be promoted as the only measure to prevent HIV infection -- abstinence or one partner was the best way.

Dr. Walrond said: "I've always felt that if you want to get people to change their behaviour there must be alternatives and those alternatives must have some practicality,'' Dr. Walrond said. He noted that in the United States, homosexuals, because of their own active prevention campaigns, had reduced the rate of HIV transmission among themselves "quite markedly'' through the consistent use of condoms.

But in the Caribbean, many people, even those having casual sex, were apparently still not heeding the safe sex warning.

Caribbean Epidemiology Centre AIDS education/prevention campaign coordinator Ms Claudette Francis said people apparently did not seem to understand that if they stayed with one partner for two years and then broke-up, they were thrown back into the pool of selecting a new partner and that person could be carrying the AIDS virus.