A surge in chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes due to changing lifestyles could kill up to 80 million people in China in the next decade, health officials and the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

Xiao Yang, who is 150 kg (331 pounds), attempts a full split during a competition organised by a local club for overweight people in Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu Province, March 26, 2006. Xiao is 22 years old and 1.55 m (5.1 feet) tall.  About 15 percent of urban youth in China are overweigh, according to health expert. [Reuters]

If the issue was not addressed promptly, it could also heavily impact China's booming economic growth, they added.

While the death rate from infectious diseases like AIDS and lack of food would rise about two percent over the same period, for chronic diseases it would go up almost a fifth, they said.

"Since China's opening up and reforms, the country's economy has developed fast and people's standards of living have improved," deputy Chinese Health Minister Wang Longde told a conference in Beijing.

"But lifestyles, eating habits and the healthcare system have changed and so have diseases and death rates," he said. "Chronic diseases don't only affect people's health; they undermine the working strength of society."

Chinese urban residents today ate double the amount of meat they did 20 years ago and both men and woman were smoking at an earlier age, added Kong Lingzhi, deputy head of China's health ministry's Disease Control Bureau.

People ate less cereal and did less exercise than they did before and some 15 percent of urban youth were overweight, she added.

But it was not too late for China to halt the decline, said Robert Beaglehole, WHO's director of chronic diseases and health promotion.

"The good news is that these losses are preventable," he said. "The bad news is the death rate from chronic diseases in China are higher than in the United States."

Chronic disease also has a huge economic impact. The WHO estimates that such illnesses will cost China $558 billion over the next decade, the Russian Federation $303 billion and India $237 billion.

Low and middle income countries, where the epidemic is worst, needed to look to the example of industrialised nations, the WHO said in a report released last year. Some 80 percent of deaths from chronic diseases occurred in developing countries, and half were women.

The WHO wants developing countries, where most such deaths occur, to copy Western nations by discouraging tobacco use and curbing salt, sugar and saturated fats in food.

The WHO, a UN agency, has set a goal of preventing the deaths of 36 million people by 2015 by reducing death rates from chronic disease by 2 percent each year.

"Many believe, including the politicians, that chronic diseases are an inevitable part of life and death," said Henk Bekedam, WHO's China representative, adding that healthier lifestyles could prevent 80 percent of heart disease.

"The strategies and interventions have to be designed to fit the health service infrastructure and social and economic development of China at a local level," he said. "This poses a great challenge to a country as diverse as China."