Chronic diseases step out of the shadows

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-01 09:40

While AIDS and malaria have dominated world health attention over the past 10 years, chronic diseases like diabetes and heart ailments have lurked under the radar.

An old Chinese sits in front of a poster calling on the whole family to fight diabetes, which will affect 60 million Chinese in 15 years' time.

But researchers from China, Australia, Canada, Britain 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 percent of world mortality, according to Abdallah Daar of the McLaughlin-Rotman Center 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 says.

Organizers of the new Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases admit that they're just getting started, but they have a lot of catching up to do.

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