Thirty million. It’s a big number. Maybe not in the context of business news, where we usually talk about company valuations that are in the billions, or even trillions. But when we’re talking about people, 30 million is a very big number.
Thirty million is the number of people that the National Organization of Rare Disorders estimates are living with a rare disease in the United States.
Defining a rare disease can be tricky. In the U.S., a disease is considered rare if fewer than 200,000 Americans are diagnosed with it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that works out to be less than 7 in 10,000 people. In the European Union, a disease is classified as rare if it affects no more than 5 in 10,000 people. In China, it’s 1 in 10,000. Any way you define it, patient populations within the rare disease community are smaller than those diagnosed with more well-known diseases like Alzheimer’s, which the Alzheimer’s Association estimates stood at more than 7 million in the U.S. as of last year. But when you consider that there are more than 10,000 rare diseases, and as many as 400 million people suffering from them worldwide, you start to take notice.
That’s why we’re launching CNBC Cures, a new initiative to help raise awareness of rare diseases and improve patient outcomes for people living with them. Led by “Squawk Box ” anchor Becky Quick, the initiative was inspired by her family’s own rare disease journey.
