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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 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. 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. Sun Zhongnan For example, the number of people with diabetes in India doubled to 40 million from 1995 to 2007, Daar says. 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, says 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 says. "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 says. "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 says. "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.
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