Japan will host an international symposium early next month to discuss ways to strengthen cooperation in the fight against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

The symposium will be held Oct. 2 at Keio University in Tokyo's Minato Ward under the joint sponsorship of the Foreign Ministry and the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, government officials said Thursday.

Participants will include former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, former Ugandan Health Minister Dr. Chrispus Kiyonga, and Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, a Geneva-based body affiliated with the United Nations.

The officials said the symposium will discuss how to strengthen cooperation among governments, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations, based on past successes against the infectious diseases in Asia and Africa.

In recent years, health problems — especially the proliferation of AIDS, malaria and TB — have been widely considered as major obstacles to the development and reduction of poverty in the Third World.

At last year's summit of the Group of Eight major nations in Okinawa Prefecture, presided over by Mori, health was a major topic of discussion.

The G8 leaders set numerical targets for reducing cases of infection for the three major diseases, including a 25 percent reduction in the number of cases of HIV and AIDS infection among young people by 2010.

Japan also announced at the summit that it will provide $3 billion in aid to developing countries over five years to combat the diseases. Tokyo has so far disbursed or allocated for disbursement $700 million of the pledged aid.

Japan hosted a followup international conference on infectious diseases in Okinawa in December. At that time, the other G8 countries — the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Russia — also pledged specific amounts of aid.

At a three-day special U.N. General Assembly session on AIDS in New York in late June, U.N. member nations adopted a declaration calling for the early establishment of a fund to crusade against AIDS and other infectious diseases. The Global AIDS and Health Fund had been earlier proposed by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

G8 nations — expected to be major financial contributors to the fund — agreed at this year's summit in Genoa, Italy, to set up the fund by the end of this year. Their promised contributions totaled $1.3 billion, with the U.S., Britain and Japan each committing $200 million.

The G8 and other countries set up a transitional working group, which will meet three times from mid-October until the end of December to work out details. Dr. Kiyonga, who will participate in the forthcoming Tokyo symposium, was appointed as chairman of the TWG.

Through the contributions of other governments, nongovernmental organizations and private companies, it is hoped the Global AIDS and Health Fund will eventually reach the U.N. goal of $10 billion.

"While international attention has been focused on infectious diseases in Africa, we hope more attention will be paid to those diseases in Asia through the upcoming Tokyo symposium," one senior government official said, asking that he not be named. "We also hope that the symposium will help increase Japanese people's awareness of the issue and that they will make financial contributions to the fund."

According to the U.N., some 5.3 million people were infected with HIV or AIDS around the world in 2000; some 3 million died of the disease that year. In 1998, it was estimated that 273 million people were infected with malaria and 8 million with TB.