DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Dementia is the UK's biggest killer...we must drag care standards into the 21st century
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Very few families remain untouched by the ravages of dementia. It is the UK’s biggest killer, accounting for one in nine deaths and taking 76,000 lives per year.
Yet approaches to treating the illness are firmly stuck in the last century. This may well be partly due to a lingering – but erroneous – belief that the symptoms are inevitable consequences of growing older.
But if it is crucial to rid ourselves of that misconception, it is equally important to consider progress in other areas of healthcare where prospects once looked bleak.
Writing in today’s Daily Mail, Baroness Casey points out that the outlook for cancer patients has been transformed through ‘decades of research, earlier diagnoses, public awareness, clinical trials and better treatments’. It is now time, she adds, to apply the ‘same seriousness and ambition to fighting dementia’.
Baroness Casey points out that the outlook for cancer patients has been transformed through ‘decades of research, earlier diagnoses, public awareness, clinical trials and better treatments’. It is now time, she adds, to apply the ‘same seriousness and ambition to fighting dementia’
Since last year, the Mail has been spearheading a drive with the Alzheimer’s Society under the banner Defeating Dementia. Among other issues, our campaign has highlighted a postcode lottery of care with the NHS failing to meet diagnosis targets for the illness in more than half the country.
Projections indicate that 1.4million people in Britain will be living with the condition by 2040. For many sufferers (and, of course, their loved ones), the most distressing aspect is the cruel erosion of personality, memory and cognitive faculties.
Andy Burnham, whose father Roy died earlier this week after suffering from Alzheimer’s and who never learned of his son making it to No 10, knows this better than most.
Of all people, the Prime Minister must realise how crucial it is that standards of diagnosis, treatment and care are brought into the 21st century.
Finding the money to do it will involve a serious reordering of the Government’s priorities. But Mr Burnham faces few more important challenges.
Labour's deaf ear
The full-time residents of Piddington have relayed a clear message about Government policy on accommodating migrants.
Yet the prospect of anyone in Downing Street listening seems remote. Not only did Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s ‘What I would gently say to the people of Piddington…’ remark sound patronising in the extreme, it also completely failed to take account of the increasing anger across the nation.
This anger hasn’t been whipped up by far-Right rabble-rousers wearing black clothing and balaclavas. It is growing as a result of Labour’s complete failure to tackle the asylum crisis and, in particular, the decision to start dumping vast numbers of undocumented male migrants in the heart of settled communities.
The PM and his Cabinet colleagues seem determined to stick their fingers in their ears in a bid to drown out the backlash. Try as they might, they won’t be able to ignore the noise for much longer.
A Budget forecast
Responding to inflation going up to 3.1 per cent, the PM warned that next month’s Budget will be ‘challenging’. But he failed to say whether the ‘difficult decisions’ to be made will include tax increases.
Given that one of his own sometime advisers, former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, is now referring to the Burnham administration as ‘a traditional tax-and-spend socialist government with better TikTok videos’, we can probably draw our own conclusions.
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