There are more than 6,000 people aged 100 or older in Iran, says Dr. Mohsen Salman Nejad, the secretary of the National Council of the Elderly (SNCE.)
“There are also one million people aged 80 and over in the country,” Dr. Salman Nejad noted. “We hope that the government would rush the senior citizen bill to the Majlis [Iranian Parliament.] The bill will provide comprehensive social security, welfare, and healthcare services to the elderly.”
Author: Adam Jones.
Source: Flickr
Dr. Salman Nejad added: “The elderly population increases by 700,000 every year in Iran. There are currently 1.3 million senior citizens in Tehran. One out of three people in the country is aged 60 or older.”
Dr. Salman Nejad said: “We’ve been working on the National Senior Citizen Document for two years, and hope to roll out the scheme later this year. The program aims to raise greater public awareness about the elderly and provide a more comprehensive social security and healthcare scheme to them. The current welfare program doesn’t provide even basic benefits to the elderly. We are consulting foreign experts on how to implement the scheme.”
“Being old is a physiological condition, not a disease,” Dr. Salman Nejad explained. “Old age does place many limitations on people. Bad diet, pollution, a poor health care system and a shortage of medicine are detrimental to the welfare of the elderly.”
Translated from Persian by Fardine Hamidi
