While governments are finding cash and devising plans to prevent a possible flu pandemic, critics say little is being done to tackle Asia's biggest killers such as cancer, diabetes and respiratory and heart disease.

"There has been a preoccupation with AIDS and more recently bird flu, but diabetes has been escalating. It's a timebomb," said Professor Paul Zimmet, director of the International Diabetes Institute based in Australia.

"In Australia, 170 million dollars (US$123 million) has been committed to tackle a (bird flu) epidemic which may or may not happen, but we have a huge diabetes problem and there may be five million dollars spent annually. It's completely disproportionate," he said.

As the UN marks World Health Day today, countries such as India are bracing for a worsening health crisis from chronic diseases that already claim more lives than infectious diseases such as malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis.

With rising prosperity in many parts of Asia, people are adopting unhealthy lifestyles that their bodies cannot cope with. Sedentary jobs, poor diet, smoking and alcohol are all blamed for the dramatic health shift.

India leads the world in diabetes cases. A government study estimated the number of diabetics to be about 38 million in 2004, and projected to rise to 57 million in 2025.

By 2020, the number of deaths each year due to chronic diseases in the country of 1.1 billion people may stand at 7.63 million.

Top killer

"Lifestyle diseases ... have already become the number one killer in India," said D. Prabhakaran, a professor at the department of cardiology at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences.

"The most important factors for lifestyle diseases are increasing consumption of tobacco, dietary consumption of fats, particularly saturated fat, lack of physical activity and inadequacy of stress- coping mechanisms," he said.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 270 million people in Asia will die from chronic disease between 2005 and 2015, mostly poor people in developing countries such as China, India, Pakistan and Indonesia.

That represents a rise in deaths from chronic disease of 17 per cent while the region will see a 10 per cent fall in those killed by infectious diseases, antenatal and postnatal complications and malnutrition over the same period.

Asia has an estimated 8.3 million HIV/AIDS cases, while bird flu has killed 108 people out of 191 cases worldwide since the latest outbreak began in Asia in late 2003.

Chronic diseases are not just seen as a problem of the newly emerging wealthier classes.

"Seven hundred million people in the region are living on a dollar a day ... but at the same time because of economic growth the same people have access to an unhealthy diet," said Choi Daewon, head of the health and development section of the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

The economic cost of chronic diseases will run into trillions of dollars, experts say. Many Asian governments, however, spend relatively little on public healthcare and a small percentage of that goes towards prevention of lifestyle diseases.

India at present spends 0.65 per cent of GDP on health, though it aims to increase it to 2 per cent of GDP by 2010.

Choi said many governments in Asia devoted far less than 5 per cent of GDP to health, but said simply spending more was not the only solution.