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GETTYWe should campaign to make sure that all the elderly can enjoy a dignified old age
He also singled out for praise Britain’s contribution in helping various African nations to fight this disease.
We are, and always have been, a generous and compassionate society, so I suppose we should give ourselves a little pat on the back.
But this would be the self-same Ebola virus, I presume, that a few months ago appeared to constitute the end of the world as we know it: a rampaging plague that was going to wipe out half the known world.
Or should I say the half of the known world that had managed to survive bird flu, the face-eating bug – oh, and according to Stephen Hawking a few years back, acid rain.
No one wants to see anyone suffering but I’m getting a bit fed up with the end-of-the-world-as-we-know it mob who rally around these outbreaks, usually cheer-led by the BBC, which delights in turning a foreign crisis into Armageddon.
I am especially fed-up because, on the very same day we were all expected to dance a merry jig about a country 2,500 miles away being Ebola-free, the disease that has been afflicting Britain for the past few decades had produced its latest victims just a few miles outside London.
It’s a disease called Shameful Neglect Of Our Elderly.
How many times have we read accounts of elderly people being denied as simple an item as a cup of tea or a glass of water?
In the latest scandal three elderly residents of care homes in Banstead in Surrey and Sutton in south London suffered unexplained injuries. In one case 89-year-old Edna Slann now has only weeks to live due to an untreated bedsore.
Not quite as dramatic as the agonies induced by the Ebola virus, I grant you, but an outrage happening on our own doorstep and as we all know, only one example among thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of incidents of abuse and indignity being inflicted on our old people every year, not just in care homes but in some hospitals too.
How many times have we read accounts of elderly people being denied as simple an item as a cup of tea or a glass of water?
In some cases, shamefully, by “carers” who don’t want to have to help them to use the toilet at night.
A relative of mine, who had to be taken to hospital after collapsing at home, was denied water for so long on the ward she eventually became dehydrated and then delirious.
If another of my relatives had not paid a visit later that day and realised her plight, I shudder to think what might have happened.
Yet no UN doctor has been called in to oversee this epidemic.
This is probably just as well for them, since the outcome would be a lot harder to influence or predict. Certainly they wouldn’t see very much cause for optimism.
I could widen the picture and say that the entire NHS is in the process of falling apart, with a big part of that problem down to the rest of the world crowding into Britain for treatment.
But it’s the plight of our pensioners that really concerns me because I think it points towards a terrible attitude in this country, that once people get to a certain age they are no use to anyone and simply a burden.
In the same week that the plight of Mrs Slann and other residents was brought to light, we learnt, from the charity Age UK, that a whopping 900,000 old people are being denied vital home care.
The numbers of people receiving help to get out of bed, to wash and to prepare a meal (the most basic functions we all take for granted) has fallen by more than 170,000 in the past three years.
It’s all about money, of course, specifically a squeeze on state-funded social care, but it’s also, I think, about attitudes.
We have sadly become a “push past and stare at your iPhone society” in which many of us simply don’t see the old lady or the gentleman in the street struggling along with their meagre items of shopping.
We don't think about their lives, what they may have done for us and how little they may have to look forward to.
The irony is that it is these people who are most likely to dip into what cash they have and send money out to fight Ebola or help the victims of a natural disaster.
Which begs the question: why can’t there be the same massive push, nationally, to ensure proper care for our elderly people as there is to banish foreign disease?
Why is it not possible, for instance, in one campaign, to raise the billions required to ensure that our old people can all enjoy a dignified old age?
We could start, rather handsomely I think, by putting the bloated BBC on the same financial footing as the rest of television and diverting all that licence-fee money to help pay for elderly care instead.
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