My answer would be "no, but you are not far off"...............Pooh has given you an excellent explanation

My contribution is that there are so few "viruses" that linux is relatively safe, however there are a greater number of exploits.

What you have to ask yourself is what connectivity and interactivity you have. The only linux AVs that I have seen, spend most of their time looking for windows viruses, so that they don't get passed on to another windows system. In that respect, using a linux box as a filter might be a good idea, as I have not seen a virus that could shut down windows virus detecting AV running on a linux box?

Just a thought

Cheers