THE JOINT INITIATIVE by the Barbados Alzheimer’s Association and the Central Bank of Barbados to help build awareness about Alzheimer’s disease is a highly commendable effort. The response from the public indicates a sense of care and concern.
This debilitating disease affects millions across the world, regardless of colour, class or creed. One of the worrisome things is that there seems no real quick cure at hand. There is no diagnostic test to identify who has it and no treatment to effectively slow its impact on the victim. As a result, sufferers are left to steadily lose their memory, ending up with full-blown dementia, while family and caregivers watch in pain.
Given our very limited financial resources, and the need for our clinical researchers to focus on finding more pressing medical solutions, we will have to piggyback on the research being done internationally. This very costly research offers no guarantees.
Our efforts in Barbados must clearly be on helping the sufferers, their relatives and the caregivers. We have known the illness for many years, but we have either lived in denial or responded with ignorance.
Many people have put forward the hypothesis that the sufferer had been turned “foolish” by someone, or that the sufferer was now “bewitched”, while others are simply too ashamed to acknowledge the state of their relative’s illness.
Thankfully, times and people have changed and we now understand that Alzheimer’s disease is an illness that can come upon any of us. While it is a disease that generally comes with advanced age, there have been instances of people in their 50s being afflicted.
For us in Barbados, we need to take note of research done in New York, just over a decade ago, which has suggested that African Americans were more likely to be affected by Alzheimer’s than were Hispanics and Caucasians.
It is therefore heartening that Government, given its announcement last week, will be reviewing the National Assistance Board’s Home Care Programme as it attempts to help those families with loved ones at home suffering with the disease. When this plan becomes a reality, this will be support highly welcomed.
However, before any such initiative is implemented, effective training of the caregivers must be a priority.
And while the Central Bank may have met its objective of getting those millions of cents back into circulation, it must be lauded for the common sense it showed in stepping outside of its lofty towers and getting its staff involved in a project which will endear the bank to people across this island.
The challenge now is for the Barbados Alzheimer’s Association, the Central Bank, Government and private donors to get on board to bring urgent help to the thousands of Barbadians with Alzheimer’s disease. With an ageing population, we need real solutions.
