There are heroes who walk among us. In the Huntington’s disease (HD) community, some of those heroes are the leaders of Factor-H—a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of HD families in underserved communities by providing humanitarian aid, education, and advocacy. Huntington’s is an unrelentingly cruel disease that afflicts families with generation after generation of trauma, medical challenges, and overwhelming emotional, financial, and social burdens that can make even the simplest aspects of daily life a struggle.
What could make HD worse? Abject poverty so extreme that families are left utterly resourceless, living in tin-roofed huts with dirt floors without mattresses, electricity, or running water. This is the reality for some of the largest clusters of HD families in the world, located in South America—the same families that contributed to the research that discovered the gene that causes HD. Even still, every scientific advancement that the HD community hopes for and closely scrutinizes likely won’t make its way to these unimaginably vulnerable populations of people without help. That help is Factor-H.