Blog Stage Five

The Age of Alzheimer’s is an article about editorial that I read this afternoon from the New York Times.  This is a good article that reflects a serious problem: Alzheimer is a fatal disease. It will be a threat to baby boomers in the future, but now our government is not paying too much attention on it.

Three authors contributed on this article. They are not only outstanding, but also credible.  The authors are Sandra Day O’Connor, Stanley Prusiner, and Ken Dychtwald.  Sandra Day O’Connor is a retired associate justice of the Supreme Court. Stanley  Prusiner is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco. He received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Medicine. The last author, Ken Dychtwald, is a psychologist and gerontologist. Also, he is the chief executive of a company that consults with businesses about the aging world population. 

The authors’ intended audiences could be old people, baby boomers, politicians, and lawmakers.

In this article, they argued that the risk of the Alzheimer for baby boomers is very high, but so far

only a handful of medications have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat this horrific disease. Also, our government did not care about this problem. However, the authors used facts, examples, and comparisons to explain the importance for treating and protecting this disease. In conclusion, they appealed and hoped lawmakers could pass a legislation related to solve this disease. Like they mentioned, a well-designed and adequately financed national strategic plan can be used to against Alzheimer’s.

I agree with the author. If we cannot avoid Alzheimer’s disease by physical testing, the best way to fight this disease must be improve our ability to protect ourselves. Older people must pay more attention about it. Although we are young now, after 20 or 30 years, we will turn old. Government should put more attention on it—setting a goal of stopping Alzheimer’s by 2020. Otherwise, it will become a tragedy in the future.