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A University of Queensland professor is among the panel of world leading health scientists who have reached consensus on the world's most deadly diseases.

Professor Alan Lopez of UQ's School of Population Health is part of a committee of leading health experts that has declared chronic non-communicable diseases (CNCDs) to be reaching global epidemic proportions, accounting for more than 60% of deaths worldwide. Their findings are published in the pre-eminent Nature journal.

CNCDs include cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases and certain cancers. Most, says Professor Lopez, have been proven to be largely preventable.

“Healthy diet, physical activity and not smoking prevent about 80% of heart disease, strokes and type 2 diabetes and over 40 per cent of cancer cases,” he said.

In the Nature paper, the group of scientists name 20 top priorities (‘grand challenges') that must be acted upon to restrain and reverse the growing incidence of CNCDs.

They include raising the political priority of non-communicable diseases, promoting healthy lifestyle choices, addressing the impact of government spending and taxation on health, investigating the effectiveness of food labelling legislation and identifying the negative impacts of economic growth on health.

Professor Lopez, who co-authored the World Health Organisation's seminal Global Burden of Disease study, said the committee hopes to galvanise the world's political, medical and scientific leaders into taking real action on CNCDs.

“We expect the burden from CNCDs to rise quickly over the next few decades, particularly in the developing world,” he said.

“But with concerted action taken now, we can avert at least 36 million premature deaths by 2015.”

The 20 Grand Challenges complement the ‘Grand Challenges in Health' published in 2003 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an organisation established to help reduce inequities in health around the world.

The Nature paper can be read in full here.