Elinor Nauen

Elinor Nauen makes her living as a freelance magazine and book writer and editor. She has worked in magazine and book publishing for 25 years, starting as a copy editor at Woman’s World Weekly, and along the way serving as a fiction, travel and senior features editor for First and Woman’s World. She has edited books by Senator George Mitchell, Paul Krassner and Danny Schechter, among others, and edited for Seven Stories, Kodansha and other presses. She served as acting editor-in-chief of MediZine Healthy Living, special health sections editor for Newsweek and executive editor of Gender & Health, a publication of the Partnership for Women’s Health at Columbia University.

Elinor has written on health topics for Family Circle, Fitness, Self, TheBody.com, InsideMS, MediaChannel and Health. She has written on automobiles and the driving experience for WE, AARP’s My Generation (where she was the automotive columnist), Cachet, Health, New American Writing and many other publications; and on sports topics for Cult Baseball Players, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Aethlon, Sports Illustrated for Women, Nine, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, National Endowment for the Humanities Magazine, Hollywood Review, American Book Review and many other magazines and anthologies.

Her books include CARS & Other Poems, American Guys and, as editor, Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on cars & the road (Faber & Faber, 1997) and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women writers on baseball (Faber & Faber, 1994).

As if it weren't tough enough to deal with MS, what happens when you get the one-two punch of MS and another disease?

"Even though my MS diagnosis was devastating, it wasn't as much so as cancer," recalled Jane Stone*, 50, a medical secretary in New York City, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998. "You can die of cancer. Yet cancer doesn't affect me physically now, and MS does."

After more than 25 years and 25 million deaths, the world has yet to realize that HIV isn't just a man's problem. Although it has escaped the notice of most media -- and even many in the health care and health policy fields -- HIV has quietly become the third most-deadly disease for women in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease. It's also the leading cause of death for African-American women between the ages of 25 and 34.