This was emailed to me and I wanted to pass it along for our auto-immune disease community:
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Dear AARDA friend:
Your help is needed!
Do you think that there are environmental triggers that play a role in the development of autoimmune diseases, cancer, and inflammatory conditions? Autoimmune diseases have been increasing at an alarming rate. This fact points to environmental triggers, as genes do not change fast enough to play a role in the rate of increase.
You have a chance to influence research in this area by voting in an online Visionary Ideas project sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). AARDA has submitted an idea, titled: Environmental Triggers of Autoimmune Disease, for increasing research into autoimmune diseases and environmental triggers. It is visionary as this has not been an active area of research, and most research in the area has been focused on known toxic substances. However, there can be substances that are considered safe and are used on a daily basis that could trigger an autoimmune disease in a genetically susceptible person. Triggers could also be viruses or excessive stress. It is time that research looks more broadly for possible triggers rather than known toxins. We need to know how triggers combine with our genetic makeup to initiate illnesses like autoimmune diseases and cancer.
If you agree with the need to increase this type of research, AARDA would like to ask you to vote on the NIEHS site. Let's make autoimmune research number one for a change. Please encourage others to vote through your social network outlets.
To vote go to http://tiny.cc/guaw3. Register in the upper right corner (just your e-mail address) and then vote by clicking on "I agree." You can vote only once. The deadline to vote is tomorrow, April 30, 2011 at 5:00 PM, Pacific Time.
Virginia
Virginia Ladd
President
American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association
www.aarda.org
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Dear AARDA friend:
Your help is needed!
Do you think that there are environmental triggers that play a role in the development of autoimmune diseases, cancer, and inflammatory conditions? Autoimmune diseases have been increasing at an alarming rate. This fact points to environmental triggers, as genes do not change fast enough to play a role in the rate of increase.
You have a chance to influence research in this area by voting in an online Visionary Ideas project sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). AARDA has submitted an idea, titled: Environmental Triggers of Autoimmune Disease, for increasing research into autoimmune diseases and environmental triggers. It is visionary as this has not been an active area of research, and most research in the area has been focused on known toxic substances. However, there can be substances that are considered safe and are used on a daily basis that could trigger an autoimmune disease in a genetically susceptible person. Triggers could also be viruses or excessive stress. It is time that research looks more broadly for possible triggers rather than known toxins. We need to know how triggers combine with our genetic makeup to initiate illnesses like autoimmune diseases and cancer.
If you agree with the need to increase this type of research, AARDA would like to ask you to vote on the NIEHS site. Let's make autoimmune research number one for a change. Please encourage others to vote through your social network outlets.
To vote go to http://tiny.cc/guaw3. Register in the upper right corner (just your e-mail address) and then vote by clicking on "I agree." You can vote only once. The deadline to vote is tomorrow, April 30, 2011 at 5:00 PM, Pacific Time.
Virginia
Virginia Ladd
President
American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association
www.aarda.org
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