Dementia - the crisis everyone prefers to ignore, 2010

Yesterday, I wrote a post on the battle for the maternity leaves in the EU(http://myeuropeandream.blogspot.com). And the fierce opposition that the idea of 20 week full paid leave meets in the UK. And I couldn't but wonder, are those people blind? Or maybe stupid?
What is it about? Well, we observe growing retirement age across Europe. It makes some sense - as people live longer, they can stay active for longer. The population is aging anyway and someone has to work. So far so good. But as the article below(the second) tell us, it's not so good, at all. People really live longer, due to the improved health care, but they don't stay active for longer. A lot of the people get dementia in one form or another, some simply forget, other get Alzheimer and are of no use at all. This is a serious problem! According to the study, every third person at age 65 will develop dementia in some form! How those people are going to work until the get 67 or 70? Which is what the retirement reforms suggest. That could mean a lot for the economy, in the case where people hire workers at age more that 60 at all. We know how severe age discrimination is. Here in Bulgaria, most of the stores require girls aged less than 25. I can't even imagine what a 65 years old lady with possible dementia can work. With men, it's easier, because they can work as guards or something.
But the problem is very real - we keep the retirements age high, however we do not invest more money in preventing old age diseases, we don't invest into research that could keep old people healthy and active, we don't invest into making laws that protect old people from age discrimination on the work place, we don't stimulate the business to hire such people. And the worst of all - we don't make laws that will stimulate women and men to have babies! What we do can lead to a disaster. That is why, I'm all for both maternity and paternity leaves regulated by the law. European population is getting older and older. We have to fight this. We have to find a way to handle this, to make people have children, to make fathers more responsible, so that mothers will want to give birth.
It's easy to suppose women just want to have children and they will sacrifice everything to do that. Yes, but more and more women prefer not to do that. More and more women wait until they get 35 before starting to have children and at that age it's more risky and more costly in terms of healthcare. Why it should be like that? When it would be so easy to stimulate young parents to have children before they get in their 30s, so that both the mother and the baby will remain healthy and the population will get younger and fresher. Will it cost a lot? Sure! But as you can see the dementia crisis already cost a lot. What will happen when most of the workforce of the country get in their 60s? The country will lose 1/3d of that workforce to dementia and related diseases. We HAVE to invest in both preventing old-age diseases and stimulating the young to have babies. That's the only way to guarantee a healthy society. Not only for the UK, but for the whole Europe, because this problem is not only British. It's European. True, some countries have higher birthrates, but that's only temporary state. Under those laws, most people just prefer not to risk with a baby. Most women prefer not to. And that's bad. That's disastrous. We have to change it.
P.S. Science claims there is a way to prevent dementia to certain extent:

Learning keeps brain healthy: study

UC Irvine neurobiologists are providing the first visual evidence that learning promotes brain health - and, therefore, that mental stimulation could limit the debilitating effects of aging on memory and the mind. source

Britain ignoring its dementia crisis, Oxford study finds

Disease costs more than cancer and heart disease combined but receives a fraction of research funding

Britain's dementia crisis is worse than feared and costs Britain £23bn a year – more than cancer and heart disease combined – but receives a fraction of the funding, according to a study published today.

The number of people with dementia, at 822,000, is 17% higher than has previously been estimated and will pass the 1 million mark before 2025, the Oxford university study has found.

Researchers calculated that for every pound spent on dementia studies, £12 is spent on investigating cancer and £3 on heart disease. They said the ageing population was largely behind the rise in dementia and public attitude contributed to the relative lack of research funding.

"People do consider dementia as an inevitable part of getting old. People who reach the age of 65 have a one in three chance of having dementia before they die," said the report's author, Professor Alastair Gray of the university's Health Economics Research Centre.

The Dementia 2010 report compares the condition's overall annual cost of £23bn with £12bn for cancer care and the £8bn for heart disease.

The £23bn includes £9bn for social care, £12bn for unpaid care and £1.2bn in healthcare costs.

At £590m, cancer research funding is 12 times the £50m devoted to dementia, while heart disease receives more than three times as much. Stroke research receives less.

Each dementia patient costs the economy £27,647 each year, researchers found, nearly five times more than a cancer patient and eight times more than someone with from heart disease.

The expense is driven mainly by the extent of unpaid care and long-term institutional care – in contrast to cancer and heart disease, where costs are mainly taken care of by the NHS. source