It is a disease one in three of us will develop – 135 million people will have it by 2050 and its worldwide health and social-care cost in 2010 was estimated at £400bn…yet no one is ready for the worldwide pandemic that is dementia.

My Guardian interview with leading microbiologist Peter Piot today, coinciding with the G8 Summit on dementia, underlines why international action is vital. Piot, who spent four decades investigating the world’s deadliest diseases and whose pioneering work made HIV/Aids a global priority, is in no doubt that dementia is now the world’s greatest social, economic and moral challenge.

“There’s not enough awareness of how bad the problem is,” warns Piot, a global health expert and director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Like most of us who know someone who has had or is living with dementia (my grandfather had it), Piot’s father-in-law had the illness, so he knows first hand of the denial and stigma it brings: “It is the most neglected of all the neglected health problems and it’s a hidden problem because people are at home – they’re already written off by society”.You can read the rest of my piece is here.

When Piot argues that the discrimination faced by people with dementia is tantamount to a “human rights violation” and more than just a medical problem, I couldn’t agree more.

Funding and focus on research is essential, but this has to be accompanied by a change in attitudes – and the latter will be an uphill struggle for a society fails to have older people on its radar, regardless of whether or not they have dementia.