Cancer is the world's top "economic killer" as well as its likely leading cause of death, the American Cancer Society contends in a new report it will present at a global conference in China this week.

Cancer costs more in productivity and lost life than AIDS, malaria, the flu and other infectious diseases, the report concludes.

Chronic diseases, including cancer, heart disease and diabetes, account for more than 60 per cent of deaths worldwide but less than three per cent of public and private funding for global health, said Rachel Nugent of the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based policy research group.

Money shouldn't be taken away from fighting diseases that spread person-to-person, but the amount devoted to cancer is way out of whack with the impact it has, said Otis Brawley, the cancer society's chief medical officer.

Cancer's economic toll was $895 billion US in 2008 — equivalent to 1.5 per cent of the world's gross domestic product, the report says.

That's in terms of disability and years of life lost — not the cost of treating the disease, which wasn't addressed in the report.

Rising burden

The World Health Organization has long predicted that cancer would overtake heart disease this year as the leading cause of death. About 7.6 million people died of cancer in 2008, and about 12.4 million new cases are diagnosed each year.

Tobacco use and obesity are fueling a rise in chronic diseases while vaccines and better treatments have led to drops in some infectious diseases.

Many groups have been pushing for more attention to non-infectious causes of death, and the United Nations General Assembly has set a meeting on the issue a year from now. Some policy experts are comparing it to the global initiative that led to big increases in spending on AIDS nearly a decade ago.

"This needs to be discussed at the UN — how we are going to deal with this [rising burden of chronic disease]," said Dr. Andreas Ullrich, medical officer for cancer control at the WHO.

The answer is "not a fight against each other" but more co-operation in areas that overlap, such as cancers with infectious causes, such as cervical cancer and HPV, or human papillomavirus, Ullrich said.

Any review of priorities is sure to be contentious, though.

Lung and related cancers account for 20% of cost

The cancer society's report is the first major effort to look at the economic cost in terms of global productivity. It was done with Livestrong, cancer survivor and cyclist Lance Armstrong's foundation. Authors plan to publish it in a scientific journal and to present it Thursday at the biannual meeting of the World Cancer Congress in Shenzen, China.

Researchers used the WHO's death and disability reports and economic data from the World Bank. They calculated disability-adjusted life years, which reflect the impact a disease has on how long and how productively people live.

"That has become a more and more common way of looking at the global burden of disease," said Wendy Max, a health economist at the University of California, San Francisco, who is familiar with the work and the methods the researchers used.

Lung and related cancers account for $180 billion of the $895 billion total cost of cancer. Smokers die an average of 15 years earlier than non-smokers, the report says. Heart disease follows cancer, with an economic impact of $753 billion.

"Heart conditions usually hit people towards the end of their life," said the lead author, Cancer Society health economist Hana Ross. "The cancers struck people much earlier in their life cycle."