Kit Kellison writes:

Subject: autoimmune disease

Why yes, now that you mention it, I am a little jealous of pink awareness. Although I have a friend who has a slew of female relatives affected with breast cancer and has to live under a cloud if impending doom, and I really really hope that a cure is found, for her sake as well as my own, I wish there was a tenth of the attention given to autoimmune conditions that there is to breast cancer awareness. After all, it affects one in five human beings on the planet, most of us women. A woman is three times as likely, in fact, to have an autoimmune disease as to have breast cancer. Although autoimmune diseases are often interlinked and have common threads, no one specialist can treat us (most autoimmune patients have more than one autoimmune disease, nature of the beast). We often do, however, have the same mental health problems, the same fatigue problems and the same likelihood that we will go on to develop yet another autoimmune disease.