Dr. Frieden suggested that the elderly avoid contact with sick children.
According to the Campaign to End Loneliness, 17% of Britain's elderly have contact with relatives, friends or even neighbours less than once a week; for 11% of them, the rate is less than once a month.
He said that he was intent on offering the homebound elderly more contact, through other visiting programs and telephone reassurance services, though it was unclear to advocacy groups where resources for these will come from in an already overburdened system.
If the senior is not in the care of either a nurse or living in a nursing home, and you suspect that it's family members that are abusing the elderly person, contact a social worker from a government-funded family service group, and tell the worker your concerns.
"We have had several elderly people contacting us and thanking us for taking them on a journey they couldn't physically have gone through".
Of the 521 elderly initially contacted and responding to the evaluation protocol applied in the first phase of the FIBRA-RJ study, 32 had to be excluded for not meeting the eligibility criteria, and 145 refused to indicate an informant or the informants refused to participate in the study.
"We need to safeguard ballot boxes, link with other forums, create lists of volunteers who would contact elderly people or others that do not use the Internet," Mr. Coskun said.
Some 20% of the multimorbid elderly had one contact with a physician practice every week.
Overseas research points to the importance of poverty and poor social networks leading to the elderly losing social contact and not receiving medical attention.
