Travels of a Fish Nut

Summary of the Bristol Festival of Ideas/MRC ICU talk by Carol Brayne , Director of the Cambridge Institute for Public Health titled “ Challenging the ‘Dementia Tsunami’ “.  It’s pretty much common knowledge that life expectancy is increasing. This is in large part due to improvements in child health which means that more and more children survive into adulthood. But even for those who reached adulthood, living into dotage was an uncommon occurrence until relatively recently. Unfortunately, by fixing the health problems of the young we are finding that there are a myriad of health problems in the old - you win some, you lose some.

I’m sat in a oak-panelled room. The floor is wooden, the ceiling is decorated with plaster mouldings – ceiling roses, cornices and covings – that show that this is a room where the decoration is restrained not because of matters of cost but because of matters of taste. On the walls paintings of be-robed academics gaze down on the crowd as it filters in and slowly raises the volume from a quiet hush to a vibrant chatter.

I have to admit, I haven’t paid much attention to the news on the Ebola outbreak in western Africa. It feels a long way away and I’ve had a lot going on closer to home which has meant my ability to, well, to put it bluntly, to care, has been limited. But last week I went to a talk by a doctor from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders or MSF) which began to change that. I was invited by a friend and knew nothing in advance, but given the nature of the topic I was expecting a dry, statistics-filled talk. What we got was very different. The talk was by Dr Gabriel Fitzpatrick, Chairperson of MSF Ireland and it was a very much more personal and intimate talk than I anticipated. He had been working the previous month in Sierra Leone and described the work being done by doctors on the ground. It found it really interesting and thought there might be others who would also find it interesting.