Investment in health research for developing countries still accounts for only a fraction of the global total in spite of a sharp rise in global funding, an international health official said on Monday at an ongoing global forum in Beijing.

About US$125 billion is being spent each year on health research, a four-fold increase over the past 20 years, said Stephen Matlin, the executive director of the 11th Global Forum for Health Research. In contrast, only ten percent of global health research funding is spent on dealing with health problems in developing nations, which have 90 percent of the world's population.

The pattern of major health threats in developing countries has changed, he said, with diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and strokes becoming more serious threats in addition to malaria and tuberculosis. However, health research that produces solutions requiring expensive drugs and sophisticated technology would only have limited applicability in poorer countries, he said.

He went on to stress that the global forum will help invest more in developing countries and try to realize the Millennium Development Goals, a series of social and economic targets formulated by the United Nations that aim to halve extreme poverty by 2015.

Matlin stressed that developing countries need to develop stronger and more robust health systems to deal with the health problems of growing populations.

To achieve that, more public health exchanges and cooperation are needed to improve the situation, and developed countries should provide technical assistance and funding for developing countries, said Chen Zhu, China's Minister of Health. He explained that China is trying to increase investments in health care but admitted "China still suffers from wide disparities in allocation of health resources."

World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan believes that advances in healthcare must keep the poor in mind. "If we want healthcare to reduce poverty, we cannot allow the cost of care to drive impoverished households even deeper into poverty," she said.

The 11th Global Forum for Health research, scheduled from Oct. 29 to Nov. 2, has attracted more than 800 officials, scholars, and scientists from over 80 countries and regions. The Geneva-based Global Forum for Health Research is aimed at helping developing countries to improve their healthcare.

(Xinhua News Agency October 31, 2007)