L.U.P.U.S. Holds Disease Awareness Event
Loving U Pass Ur Sickness (L.U.P.U.S.), a non-profit designed to assist individuals suffering from lupus, live full, productive and healthy lives, held its first fundraising/awareness event at the Hubbard Street Loft, 1821 W. Hubbard St., this past weekend. The event provided a platform for testimonials, networking and shopping.
L.U.P.U.S. was launched in November 2013 by its current chief executive officer (CEO), Felicia Townsend, due to her diagnosis with lupus in 2011.
“My organization is based off helping the people, helping everyone. If I can help just one person understand that, yes, you have this disease but if you fight with a support group behind you, you can be OK, you can live with it, you can function,” said Townsend. “I felt that there was no help out there for us, no support group, there was no one out there to actually tell me that I would be OK.”
When asked why her event this weekend was important, Townsend told the Chicago Citizen Newspaper, “To me, it’s important for people to have awareness because I always say, ‘lack of knowledge, you die’; it’s not the disease, it’s the lack of knowledge.”
African American women are particularly in danger of suffering from lupus. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office on Women's Health, African American women are three times more likely to get lupus than Caucasian women.
“L.U.P.U.S.is very necessary in the African American community because we don’t have enough awareness campaigns to teach what lupus is,” said SunRai Consulting Group LLC CEO & Founder, Rachel Rai Henry, whose aunt has lupus. “There is a stigma that it is something that you cannot survive from because there is not a lot of information available to us so the more African Americans, as well as Hispanics, come together and learn about what this disease is, there’s many different stages and many different types of lupus, we can come together and help educate from the youngest age all the way to the oldest.”
According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) is an auto-immune disease in which the immune system produces antibodies to cells within the body leading to widespread inflammation and tissue damage. The causes of SLE are unknown but are believed to be linked to genetic, environmental, and hormonal factors.
Lupus differs from the Human Immune Deficiency Virus (HIV) or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in that lupus is not contagious and that it causes the human immune system to become overactive in comparison to HIV/AIDS which causes the immune system to become underactive according to the Lupus Foundation of America (LFA). Lupus, while potentially life-threatening, is manageable with the proper medical care.
The LPA estimates that 1.5 million people in the United States have lupus - there has yet to be a conclusive study - and roughly five million people have lupus world-wide.
For more information about L.U.P.U.S, visit their Facebook page.
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