Lingering myths, misconceptions and taboos are the biggest obstacles in the battle to control AIDS in the Caribbean, where the number of new cases is now surpassing that of the United States, medical officials say.

The myth that AIDS is primarily a gay disease was one of the most serious, Jamaica's chief medical officer Dr. Peter Figueroa told a Caribbean workshop this week on responsible reporting of AIDS.

It was also the most easily exploded myth given the Caribbean Epidemiology Centres (CAREC) statistic that an overwhelming 67 percent of AIDS cases in the 19 islands that report to it (18.7 percent in Bermuda) resulted from heterosexual relations. AIDS was also mainly a heterosexual disease in all of Africa and most countries worldwide, he added.

Nevertheless, "many heterosexuals whose sexual behaviour puts them at risk, mistakenly believe that they will not get AIDS because they are not gay,'' Dr.

Figueroa told workshop participants.

He noted the alarming results of a 1992 "knowledge, attitude and practices'' survey in his country which found 81 percent of respondents believed AIDS was a homosexual disease.

This was despite a recent Jamaican survey showing 90 percent of 1,000 respondents knew how AIDS was transmitted and how to prevent it.

As he noted previously, "the gap between knowledge of AIDS and individuals assessing their own personal risk is high.'' Jamaica with 762 AIDS cases has the eighth highest per capita AIDS rate in the Caribbean.

Dr. Figueroa said other persistent myths, misconceptions and taboos hindering the fight against AIDS included: men can't catch AIDS from women; you will not get AIDS if you choose your sex partner carefully -- this myth is related to the myth you can tell a person has AIDS by looking at them; a person can get AIDS from an insect bite; the belief that "I am not at risk because I stick to one partner''; the taboo that talking explicitly about sex with young people will lead to promiscuity -- Dr. Figueroa believed sex education was "the most serious deficiency'' of Jamaica's national HIV-STD control programme.

Costa Rica AIDS researcher Dr. Jacobo Schifter said he had found people who looked upon HIV infection as a gay problem tended to be homophobic, a word coined to describe people with negative attitudes towards homosexuals.

Homophobia was highly prevalent in Jamaica but not as much in other islands, according to CAREC spokesman Mr. Leslie Fitzpatrick.

In Bermuda it showed its face during the run-up to the Stubbs gay rights bill debate.

The majority of Costa Ricans supported gay rights, but they were not so favourable towards open social rights for gays, Dr. Schifter noted.

In a recent analysis of the impact of homophobic attitudes, he found the more homophobic a person was the more exposed he or she was to the risk of contracting AIDS. "The reason is simple,'' Dr. Schifter said. "Those who are more homophobic tend to look upon the problem of AIDS as a homosexual matter.

The more they look upon it that way, the less risk they feel of getting infected and the more exposed they become through unsafe conduct and practices. Besides that, they tend to be less informed on the disease and they have a great tendency to reject the use of prophylactics and ignore prevention campaigns. Hence homophobia affects not only homosexuals but also heterosexuals and exposes them to a greater risk of infection.'' AIDS prevention campaigns were "doomed to produce insignificant changes in sexual practices and sexual conduct'' if the role of attitudes as barriers was not addressed in the fight against the pandemic, he concluded. "If people have more positive attitudes against prevention, then myths, misconceptions and taboos will be easily eliminated,'' he said. "But if attitudes function as barriers and obstacles to the assimilation of correct information, then information campaigns will be seriously jeopardised.'' The workshop is being held at the Mona Campus of the University of West Indies.