PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Health officials are concerned that an increase in the number of gay and bisexual men contracting the HIV virus and sexually transmitted diseases could create a health crisis not seen in years.

State data show that gay and bisexual men are making up a larger proportion of new HIV diagnoses in Maine. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS and is spread most often through sexual contact, contaminated needles shared by drug abusers, infected blood and from pregnant women to their offspring.

Gay and bisexual men represent about 71 percent of the 41 cases of HIV reported in Maine so far this year, up from 56 percent of the reported cases in 2002, 45 percent of the cases in 2001 and 38 percent of the cases in 2000.

Health experts say older men in the high-risk group may be tired of being vigilant about protected sex, while younger men don’t remember the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

“What we could be seeing is a resurgence of HIV around the corner,” said Mark Griswold, an epidemiologist with the state’s HIV/STD program.

Miles Rightmire, a health educator in Portland’s public health division of the Department of Health and Human Services, recently counseled a young man in his mid-20s about HIV.

“He snapped his fingers in my face and said, ‘Don’t you know that AIDS is over?”’ Rightmire said.

Federal health officials say there has been in increase in HIV among gay and bisexual men around the country for several years, but Maine health experts say the trend has taken longer to show up here because of a smaller population.

The threat of an HIV resurgence seems even more likely because more gay and bisexual men in Maine are also being diagnosed with other sexually transmitted diseases, which make immune systems more susceptible to HIV, officials say.

Gay and bisexual men accounted for about 34 percent of 90 gonorrhea cases in 2000, and now represent 44 percent of 142 cases to date in 2003.

Charles Dwyer, coordinator of the state’s HIV/STD program, said there are plans to retool the state’s prevention campaign because safe-sex messages have grown stale, especially with younger men.

When he was in his 20s during the mid-1990s, Dwyer “felt shell-shocked by the number of people I knew who were dying and I think it’s such a different reality for young men today; they’ve never really experienced that.”

Dwyer said he’d like to try a new approach by calling on people living with HIV to talk about how the disease is “no piece of cake.” Anti-HIV drug “cocktails” can delay symptoms for decades, but the drugs have such side effects as vomiting. And some people develop resistance to the medication.