translated from Spanish: Majors for Development rejects WHO proposal that considers old age as a disease: “No, old age is the extended victory of a new age”

The organization Majors for Development put a warning voice in front of the update of the International Classification of Diseases —called ICD— made by the World Health Organization WHO, incorporating old age as a category that allows health professionals to classify certain episodes related to mortality or morbidity.
According to them, the importance of classification is significant both in the fields of health and finance for which it operates as a reference work in the diagnosis, research and definition of diseases. The new version (ICD-11) is now available online and will be used from January 2022.
Mayors for Development declares that “to the extent that we are not bodies called upon to represent sick people but people who are ageing, we ask the WHO, allied to so many struggles for the human rights of older people, to reverse this decision, which is far from attracting a scientific consensus, contradicts definitions of the WHO’s own concept of health and which certainly contributes to strengthening existing stereotypes about the old age and that they keep it, in many parts of the world, including Chile, away from the law.”
The group, which is also a space for dialogue and cultural construction, joined what they define as “bewilderment, unease and perplexity of the gerontological field by this flagrant contradiction and suspension of the sense of the dominant consensuses that the scientific community, academia, research have installed in the reflection, practices and orientation of aging and old age in recent decades in conjunction with the WHO itself assuming aging and old age not as a disease, but as a vital process and culmination thereof, and to that extent, as an inalienable human right.”
The movement composed of people from the world of arts, culture, journalism, academics, among others, and whose purpose is to promote a “citizen old age with full rights”, considers that the prolongation of life – demographic aging – “is one of the humanitarian achievements of modernity as well as a political, social and cultural challenge. Old age, on the other hand, they add, a new age in human adventure.”
“It must also be noted that, however, none of the ages have ever occurred, apart from the disease. All, on the other hand, have taken place in a body that ages, sickens, and dies. Living for long periods is precisely victory over disease, though not over death. A long old age is therefore a long victory over the disease, “they point out from Majors for Development.
They explain that “the age of vejeces is a social and cultural presence that the postmodern ethos tolerates poorly or does not tolerate. Hand in hand with science, postmodernism expresses in an absolutely unconscious way this intolerance that expresses it in the dream of the defeat of human aging assumed in specific practices of the scientific research industry of the anti-aging market, because in this field, old age is a disease”
The latter, they say, can be explained because the market, in capitalism, has no limits in its search for money. Thus, in this context, they sentence, the “old age is a disease” squares.
“In an institution like the World Health Organization, it is unacceptable and does damage with unqualifiable consequences,” they said in the statement signed by civil society organizations linked to aging and humiliation.
 

Original source in Spanish

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