We often talk aobut MS in the media and that inaccurate portrayals aside, raising awareness is a positive and necessary thing. However, one of my biggest beefs in regard to raising awareness are the "approximately 400,000 people in the US" and "2.5 million people worldwide" have MS quotes. We see these numbers in every article, obviously culled from their appearance on the NMSS website. Without being statisticians, everyone here knows there's a whole lot more people who have MS.

Today in the mail I got an invitation to an MS fundraising dinner in CA. The cover letter cited the 2.5 million people worldwide statistic and on an accompanying letter (on the local society's letterhead), it said the goal of the fundraiser was to raise money for the "101,500 touched by MS in the Southern California chapter area".

So, I got bummed out about this issue all over again today. Obviously, 25% of the entire U.S. MS population doesn't live in the LA area and it just reminded me once more about the flawed statistics.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the last time some sort of census was taken was 1979. I've read that a new census is in the works although I don't know when it's expected to appear. But in the meantime how hard would it be to collect data from the local chapters? Obviously, by virtue of the letter I got, it doesn't look like it would be that hard to get at least a BETTER number in the interim.

It just makes me feel like by these numbers remaining static, it somewhat inherently contradicts efforts to raise awareness. As the number increases for ANY disease, so will the attention.
Okay, getting off now.

I really got bummed out by this and was just wondering if anyone else is as bothered as I am.