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.