Letter of the Day: Another illness (and acronym) to watch out for: ARDS

Thank you for "At death's door with H1N1 for three weeks" (Star Tribune, Dec. 6). There is seldom any information about adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in the news, and your article was excellent.About 150,000 people in the United States develop this condition each year and only about 60 percent survive. If you go to any ICU in a metropolitan hospital, there will be several patients with ARDS. However, with improvements in medical treatment, and technology such as the RotoProne Bed, outcomes are improving, since the survival rate was only 30 percent in the past. My husband was hospitalized with pneumonia in December last year and then suddenly six days later, he was rushed to ICU, put on a ventilator and fully sedated. We were told that he had ARDS. "What is that?" we asked. We learned, as your article explained, that it is an immune response and is unpredictable.My husband was in ICU for six weeks, but unfortunately was not able to survive the assault on his lungs. The ARDS Foundation is working to promote awareness of ARDS, and to get more information about it; the website is www.ardsusa.org. NORMA VIG, BURNSVILLE