GENEVA (Reuters Health) - The World Health Organisation (WHO) and other United Nations agencies on Thursday called on drug companies and aid agencies to support a major initiative to fight infectious diseases including AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

Released before its official presentation on Saturday at the World Economic Forum, "Scaling Up the Response to Infectious Diseases: A Way out of Poverty" focuses on the link between health and economic development.

The 97-page report comes in the same week that the UN's Global Fund for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria swung into action. The three diseases strike 314 million people per year, killing 5.9 million, WHO said.

Infectious diseases overall cause 50% of deaths in developing countries, Dr. David Heymann, executive director of WHO's communicable disease programme, told a news conference.

"All of these diseases have drugs which can cure them, or prolong life as in the case of AIDS, or other interventions such as bednets and condoms which can prevent them," he said.

The report calls for an effort to take these proven strategies and increase their availability.

Building on the WHO-sponsored report "Macroeconomics and Health: Investing in Health for Economic Development," the paper has as its central theme the role the commercial sector can play in making people healthy enough to take their own destiny in hand.

"Government health systems must be diversified to use non-governmental organisations and pull in private partnerships from pharmaceutical companies but also from companies which are working in their countries on issues such as exploitation of oil resources and other activities," Heymann said.

The report describes nine success stories of such partnerships ranging from Azerbaijan to Uganda, and concludes with statements from CEOs of such private sector partners as Exxon-Mobil, GlaxoSmithKline, Medvantis and Eni.

Pharmaceutical giants including Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Pfizer and Aventis are already donating drugs to combat leprosy, lymphatic filariasis, river blindness, trachoma and sleeping sickness, respectively, according to Heymann.

Presenting the report to the media, he said: "No one would argue that we need to get all the resources we can for better health, to learn how to work with a multitude of actors.

"Industry can play a big role, both in providing general community care and also in providing drugs, sometimes in donation programmes that are sustainable, sometimes at concessionary pricing in order that countries can have access to their goods," he said.

Ellen 't Hoen, head of the drug access program for Medecins san Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), expressed concern about the involvement of private industry in the scheme.

"We are concerned about the closeness to the transnationals that grows out of this. If you start doing drug access advocacy, you start upsetting transnationals. Their playing a major role in particular programmes thus might harm the independence the WHO is supposed to have," she said.

Heymann said that there were WHO guidelines on public-private partnerships, although WHO sources speaking on condition of anonymity told Reuters Health that the guidelines have not been finalised.

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