CARICOM and the United States are expected to sign a Pan-Caribbean Partnership Agreement at the end of their one-day meeting which is to open in Georgetown this morning.

US Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, one of the highest ranking US government officials to ever visit Guyana, will head a 25-member delegation to the talks which are expected to bolster US/Caribbean collaboration on the prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS.

Thompson is also scheduled to visit the local voluntary counselling centre, Lifeline Counselling Services.

CARICOM Prime Minister with responsibility for health matters, Dr Denzil Douglas of St Kitts and Nevis will lead the regional delegation, which includes regional ministers of health, chief medical officers and other health officials in the region.

President Bharrat Jagdeo, Douglas, Guyana's Minister of Health, Dr Leslie Ramsammy, and Thompson are all scheduled to address the opening session of the one-day meeting.

CARICOM Assistant Secretary-General, Edward Greene, yesterday told reporters that the meeting was intended to foster dialogue between the US and CARICOM and Caribbean states on what would be the best mechanisms they could develop in order to fight HIV and AIDS.

He said issues of training and capacity building, resource mobilisation and technical assistance and the critical issue of accelerated access to treatment and care would form the core subjects of discussion. How the discussions would go was anyone's guess, but he said that the region would seek to establish closer relations in those areas to drastically reduce the incidence of HIV and AIDS, which in Guyana was tremendously higher than "we would want to live with."

Regional ministers of health and other officials are already in the country having attended the Sixth Meeting of the CARICOM Council on Human and Social Development (COHSOD) which ended yesterday. Thompson and some members of his delegation were due to arrive in the country last evening. Some members arrived during the week.

Among those in Thompson's delegation are representatives from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the US Agency for International Development.

According to a US Department of Health and Human Services release the Caribbean has an estimated 420,000 individuals living with HIV and AIDS and Latin America another 1.4 million living with the disease.

The release quoted Thompson as saying that the Pan Caribbean Partnership was an essential and necessary step to ensure that persons living with HIV and AIDS and those at risk, have access to prevention and treatment services.

The partnership agreement, the release said, will expand the reach of the US Department of Health and Human Services programmes, particularly the Global AIDS Programme, which is a joint collaboration between the CDC and the HRSA to operate health staff in 25 countries to help prevent HIV infection, improve care and treatment and build capacity to address the global pandemic.

The agreement will increase the number of on-the-ground global AIDS staff and the CDC plans to announce additional staff placements in Guyana, Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago.

In addition, the HRSA will preview the future development of a partnership with Caribbean regional organisations, ministries of health and non-governmental organisations to support the development of HIV and AIDS care and treatment infrastructure.

The release said that the Department of HSS's fiscal budget for the year 2003 includes US$477 million for a multi-faceted effort to combat HIV and AIDS in developing countries and it included a total of US$100 million for the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. It also includes US$144 million for the CDC's prevention, care and treatment capacity development activities to slow the spread of AIDS in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Caribbean.