Eight international organizations has announced that leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) rich nations would meet next month in Japan, to tackle health scourges in developing nations in order to improve global prosperity and safety.

Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General and the heads of other bodies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said that the earlier Japanese G8 summit held at Okinawa in the year 2000 energized efforts to combat AIDS, halting tuberculosis, reducing the number of malaria deaths, and bringing polio close to eradication.

Since then access to HIV treatment in developing countries has soared up, and efforts to tackle tuberculosis, polio, measles and malaria have made progress.

“Without doubt, the spirit of Okinawa drove efforts that improved the health of millions of people,” they stated in a letter to be published in Tuesday’s edition of the International Herald Tribune and issued on its website on Monday.

“Now, the Hokkaido summit presents Japan and its fellow G8 leaders with an ideal opportunity to protect these achievements, to renew existing commitments to reproductive health and fight against HIV, TB and malaria, to finish polio eradication and to address the terrible gaps that remain in public health,” they said.

They called on the G8 leaders to manage single-disease initiatives by backing and toning up health systems, commit to new long-term predictable financing related to outcomes in healthcare and disease reduction and augment efforts in nutrition, clean water and sanitation.

“A world that neglects the health of people is neither stable nor secure,” they told.

The G8 comprises Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States and Russia.