Washington (dpa) - 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.
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 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.
Copyright 2009 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH