Volunteers search for elderly with Alzheimer’s

Su Xiao, 49, and Xu Guangchun, 42, are like-minded souls on the streets of Beijing, checking surveillance cameras and consulting passersby, with a near-constant barrage of calls on their phones.

They are on the lookout for senior citizens with Alzheimer’s disease, a hard-hitting disease that can easily erase a patient’s memory and other major mental functions.

Seven years ago, Su and Xu co-founded the Beijing Voluntary Emergency Rescue Service Center, which launched a public welfare campaign to help families find their lost elders in 2016.

Su, an outdoor sports lover, is a seasoned mountain rescue professional. On New Year’s Day of 2016, he was on his way to a nearby ski resort where he ran into a listless and pale elderly woman who was holding a sack and shivering in the cold under a bridge.

She was mumbling, saying that she was about to buy noodles for her son, and reminded Su of his grandmother, an Alzheimer’s patient.

“A lady of her age and with such health conditions was most likely unable to take care of her children,” he said.

Su reported the situation to the police and they found a scrap of paper with a contact number in her pocket. It turned out that days had passed since she lost contact with her family and she had traveled more than 40 kilometers from her home in southwestern Beijing to an unfamiliar neighborhood in the east of the city.

“Before starting on her way back home, the old lady just clutched me, begging me for food stamps so that she could go buy noodles,” Su said. However, food stamps have not been used for decades, being relics of a time when China had a planned economy.

Though they lose almost all their recent memories, patients who suffer from the illness often have vivid recollections of things that happened a long time ago.

They can easily get lost even in familiar environments. Once lost, they may succumb to the elements.

According to statistics revealed by a white paper released in 2016 by the Zhongmin Social Assistance Institute, about 500,000 senior citizens get lost each year, with about 80 percent over the age of 65. Alzheimer’s disease is one of the top reasons for them going missing.

Su and his rescue team watch surveillance videos first to sort out clues before further rescue efforts, and rely on the elderly person’s experiences in their childhood and youth as clues when looking for them.

He once managed to find an 80-year-old along a river in a suburb of Beijing, based on the elderly person’s childhood life experience of living on a riverboat.

The youngest person they have found was in their late 40s, Su said, adding that patients aged under 60 are difficult for family members and other people to spot, not to mention those who dismiss the illness as ominous and are unwilling to confide in their neighbors, relatives or friends.

Su and Xu’s “lost and found” service has sent more than 320 elderly people back home safe and sound. More than 500 volunteers, including some family members of people they have found, have joined the rescue team.

“The farther we walk, the closer the lost elders get to their homes,” Su said.