How Tragedy Spurred Backstreet Boy's Health Crusade
Date: November 7, 2001
Source: People Magazine / Backstreet.net
For Howie D., doing something good is just part of the family experience.
The Backstreet Boy -- whose real name is Howie Dorough -- recently toured Children's Hospital in Boston, as part of a very different type of promotional tour. His appearance was to highlight a new alliance between Veritas Medicine (an online resource providing information on clinical trials and treatment for lupus and 50 other diseases) and the Dorough Lupus Foundation, which the musician and his family founded after his older sister, Caroline, died of the disease in 1998.
Howie, 28, wearing a jeans and a bowling-style shirt embroidered with his name, signed autographs and talked to the young patients, many of whom were overwhelmed with emotion just at the sight of him.
Not that Dorough didn’t get emotional himself. Speaking of his late sister, he told PEOPLE, "She had carried the disease for about 15 years of her life. She had the normal symptoms the past eight years, especially the chronic cough and swelling of the joints, and the butterfly rash that she would get when she would go out in the sun."
Lupus, which mostly affects women between the ages of 15 and 44, is a disease that causes the immune system to attack the body's own tissue, often resulting in organ damage, including kidney failure. An estimated 1.4 million people in the U.S. suffer from the severely debilitating and often life-threatening disease.
"It was nothing I would have thought would have taken her life," said Dorough, "but having the complication of having her second child (about 10 years ago), she really took a turn for the worse. About a half a year after that we decided to create a foundation."
The Dorough Foundation's Web site (doroughlupusfoundation.org) and Veritas Medicine (veritasmedicine.com) have placed links on their sites allowing users to interconnect between sites. (Veritas was established by Dr. John Yee, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital.) Both groups hope that the links will help in the dissemination of information about lupus. "We have a lot of support from other corporate sponsors," continued Dorough, "but to actually have a company that deals with clinical trials was a great match." He also believes that his sister might have been able to benefit from the type of information that the Veritas Medicine site provides. "She was doing a lot of things we found out later on that she shouldn't have been doing. (But) she didn't want the disease to take her down. She just wanted to live a normal life."
Dorough says that he feels better being able to do something that might benefit other people who are suffering as Caroline did. Another sister, Angie Herring, runs the foundation (as its president), while Dorough calls himself the CEO.
"To give back is always a good feeling," he says. "Once we started, I was being overwhelmed with people coming to me offering help. It's kind of weird now. Throughout the last three years I've learned lot more about the disease. And now when I meet people with lupus and I'm asking questions, sometimes I think, 'I guess my sister probably went through this same stage,' or I find myself wondering what phase they are in."
-- STEPHEN M. SILVERMAN -- Reporting by TOM DUFFY, Boston.