BIRMINGHAM (AFP) — Best-selling author Terry Pratchett, who has Alzheimer's disease, has warned that the nation faces a "tsunami" of dementia sufferers and pleaded for more funding into research.
Pratchett told the Tory party conference that there would be over one million Alzheimer's sufferers in the country by 2025.
Pausing at times in reading his speech -- because the brain-attacking disease was "making the letters dance" -- 60-year-old Pratchett said: "We are facing a tsunami. I am just a little wave ahead of the rest.
"Technically, I have early onset, but growing older behind me are the baby-boomers."
He said awareness of the disease had "slipped". While the once-taboo subject of cancer was now discussed openly, Alzheimer's remained "stuck in a medieval fog of superstition, misunderstanding and silence.
"I want this disease to be dragged into the light and stay there and seen for what it is -- a random disease and no cause for shame," he added.
Pratchett, who said he was apolitical, appealed for researchers to be given the funds and the support to develop drugs to slow the effects of the progressive disease, for which there is no cure.
He warned that unless medical advances were made, the strain on the health service and on carers would be "unbearable".
Pratchett's books about Discworld, a flat universe balanced on the back of four elephants which themselves stand on a giant turtle, have sold 55 million copies worldwide.
This year he donated one million dollars towards Alzheimer's research.
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