RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 7 (AFP) - Poverty, religious teachings and sexual taboos have helped render AIDS prevention efforts insufficient in Latin America and the Caribbean, where some 1.6 million people suffer from the AIDS virus.

Preventing the spread of the disease was the topic of Tuesday's opening meeting of the International Forum on AIDS in Latin America and the Caribbean, taking place this week in Rio de Janeiro.

Doctors and representatives from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) listed poverty, lack of information, religious teachings, the price of condoms, secrecy surrounding homosexual relations, and women's situations in some Latin American countries among factors hindering AIDS prevention efforts.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, some 600 people contract the AIDS virus every day, which translates to a new case every two minutes, according to UNAIDS figures.

But the AIDS outlook is most worrying in the Caribbean, the world's second most affected region, following Africa.

In Haiti, five percent of adults are HIV positive -- suffering from the virus that often results in AIDS -- compared with four percent in the Bahamas and 2.8 percent in the Dominican Republic.

In Latin America, 0.49 percent of the population is infected with the virus and, in 75 percent of the cases, the illness has been transmitted through sexual relations.

Nonetheless, people have become more aware of the risks involved in having sex. In 1985, 2.6 percent of South American men used condoms in their first sexual encounters, but that figure rose to 17 percent in 1998.

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