There's a mystery.. adult nappies

Shopping in Spain last week I noticed Adult nappies (diapers) on sale in the supermarket right next to the baby nappies.

Granted lots of folks clearly need these nappies/diapers due to bladder issues so there's no great surprise or mystery there.

The mystery is that these items are never seen on the shelves of supermarkets in Ireland.

Does this mean that only people living outside Ireland have incontinence problems? Or are we too ashamed to display such things in a supermarket frequented by the general public?

I'm going to go with the "shame" angle here. A quick search on Google reveals a Yahoo! page with loads of suppliers offering to discretely ship this shocking product to one's home. Yes, discrete shipping to help you avoid public shame and humiliation.

So we can go and buy toilet paper and those moist toilet wipes (see here for problems with these particular items) without incurring too much shame, but the unfortunate person with an incontinence problem must stay away from the supermarket. You'd swear this condition was contagious or something.

One point of caution. I am not referring to products for those folks who like to dress up like babies and stick dummies in their mouths. That's a whole other ball game.

So, good for Spain that this product is on sale and no-one is batting an eye-lid.

Unfortunately we Irish seem to share the same sense of shame about personal matters with our British cousins.

It seems that some 19 million people in the US suffer from this condition. So working the maths and applying roughly the same percentage to the Irish population it would seem that 230,000 people should be needing these products in Ireland.

So why aren't they on sale openly in the supermarket?

Now there's a mystery for you.