Reuters investigates the legitimacy of North Korea's appeals for massive food aid that have gone mostly unanswered by a skeptical international community.

The 2011 high-level UN meeting on non-communicable diseases fell far short of the major funding and targets agreed to at a similar meeting on HIV/AIDS a decade ago, which CFR's Thomas Bollyky says indicates a need for different actors and approaches on chronic diseases.

Why is the UN convening a summit-level meeting on illnesses like cancer and diabetes? This CFR guide looks at how these non-communicable diseases have amplified the burdens on developing states and the global threat they pose.

NCDs such as cancer and heart disease are becoming leading causes of death in the developing world and will be the focus of a September UN meeting. But health experts and others are divided about how much funding should go into a global campaign aimed at preventing NCDs and whether infectious disease programs will suffer as a result.

The World Health Organization has gained prominence for its success in battling diseases such as polio and malaria, but is challenged by an unwieldy mission and strained resources in a landscape of competing organizations.

This declaration, a draft resolution on noncommunicable diseases, is dated September 16, 2011. It was released before the UN General Assembly meeting on September 19-20, 2011.

This WHO document was released after the World Health Assembly on May 24, 2008. It was "designed to promote innovation, build capacity, imoprove access and mobilize resources".

Laurie Garrett says the movie Contagion serves as a warning that a globally coordinated and equitable response to any pandemic is needed.

Amanda Glassman, director of Global Health Policy at the Center for Global Development, discusses the impact of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), strategies to reduce NDC occurence, and the failure to implement such interventions.

Derek Yach, director of global health policy at PepsiCo, discusses the role of government and business in lowering mortality rates from non-communicable diseases (NCDs). "We now have overwhelming evidence, both of the health impact, and perhaps as importantly, we're starting to see the economic impact of heart disease, diabites, chronic lung disease, cancer," says Yach, arguing this data is raising global interest in the issue of NCDs.

Amanda Glassman and Kate McQueston suggest five affordable low-cost or no-cost interventions against the increasing frequency of non-communicable diseases.

The authors consider how non-communicable disease prevention strategies might be integrated into pre-existing health platforms in order to minimize costs and maximize efficiency.

Sir George Alleyne, Alafia Samuels, and Karen Sealey explain the tensions between advocacy factions in the effort to reduce non-communicable diseases (and communicable diseases), and potential constructive resolutions.

Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, explores the lasting impact of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks that followed on disaster preparedness and health policy in the United States. Garrett argues that "all our readiness response depends on well-funded police, well-funded fire departments, well-funded hospitals, well-funded public health infrastructures, and precisely the opposite is where we are going right now." Garrett cautions that U.S. preparedness for a major terrorist attack may be decreasing. "As budgets are being cut at the federal level, the state level, and the local level, we're actually less ready than we were in 2001," Garrett says.

This roundtable, Crisis in the Horn: Can We Prevent One Million Deaths Today and Worse Famines Tomorrow?, was part of CFR's Global Health program.

Yanzhong Huang discusses the impact of chronic, noncommunicable disease on development in the BRICS nations.

Tobacco is reemerging as a polarizing issue in U.S. trade policy. New trade agreement negotiations are forcing the White House to choose between the tobacco debate's partisans. This policy innovation memorandum proposes a new strategy by which the Obama administration can better balance U.S. mandates on trade policy on tobacco with its interests in promoting global health and U.S. standing abroad.

The Non-Communicable Diseases Alliance (NCD) released this action plan on noncommunicable diseases in preparation for the United Nations Summit on Non-Communicable Diseases in September 2011.

The World Health Organization (WHO) published this report on the global status of noncommunicable diseases.

The World Health Organization (WHO) published this 2008-2013 Action Plan for the Global Strategy for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases in 2009.