until 1500 GMT Monday, JUNE 15: Chronic diseases step out of the shadows (Feature)

By Daniel Leaderman Jun 15, 2009, 6:04 GMT

Washington - While AIDS and malaria have dominated world health attention over the past ten years, chronic diseases like diabetes and heart ailments have lurked under the radar.

But researchers from China, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States - with India expected to sign on shortly - are working to call more attention to stroke, cancer, respiratory disease and other ailments that are becoming more common worldwide.

The numbers alone are troubling. Chronic, non-communicable diseases claim far more lives every year than infectious ailments such as AIDS - in fact, they represent 60 per cent of world mortality, according to Abdallah Daar of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health at the University of Toronto.

'There's very little funding coming to this area in terms of research and funds needed to deal with the problem. All the attention in the last decade has been dedicated to AIDS, TB, and malaria,' Daar told dpa in a telephone interview.

Organizers of the new Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases, which is formally announcing its inception Monday, admit that they're just getting started, but they have a lot of catching up to do.

For example, the number of people with diabetes in India doubled to 40 million from 1995 to 2007, Daar said. That leaves India with more people who suffer from the disease than any other country in the world, according to the International Diabetes Foundation.

That number could reach 70 million by 2025, said Stig Pramming, director of Britain's Oxford Health Alliance.

The new global consortium will focus on lower and middle-income countries.

'There's a misconception that these are diseases of affluence,' Pramming said. 'But they're diseases of poverty.'

One of the Alliance's main goals will be to develop strategies to fight these kinds of diseases on a broad scale.

'We know how to treat an individual,' Daar said. 'But how do you treat hypertension or high blood pressure at a global level? How do you scale up?'

The lack of medical infrastructure is a major obstacle in many countries, Pramming said. 'Even if we do have effective and cheap medication, how do we get it to the patients?'

One solution may be to build on resources that have already been used to fight other diseases.

'There is a lot of money going into infrastructure for HIV,' Daar said, and that same infrastructure could be used.

International collaboration will prevent the member organizations from duplicating work and will allow them to agree on protocols and methods for research, Daar said. The World Health Organization, whose job is to coordinate world research, is joining the Alliance as an observer.

Pramming stressed that the new organization is a funding group that will hold the money and set the agenda, not do the research itself.

Funds from the contributing agencies are to be financed by taxes, Daar said. 'These countries realize that health is an investment, not an expenditure. It will help increase the tax base.'

Pramming noted that a third of economic growth over the past 200 years has been the result of improved health.

The Alliance developed from a paper on the challenges of treating chronic, non-communicable diseases that Daar co-authored in 2007. That paper led to further discussion among the initiating organizations, and the plan for the Alliance developed within six months.

The participating organizations are Australia's National Health Medical Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, China's Ministry of Health, the UK Medical Research Council, the US National Institutes of Health and, eventually, the Indian Council of Medical Research.

The six organizations manage approximately 80 percent of the world's funding for public health research, the group said.

The Alliance's research priorities will be discussed at a meeting in India in November, but India and China - recent studies have shown obesity on the rise in both countries - are likely to be areas of focus for the group.