International Rosacea Foundation - The Mystery An Editorial by Brady Barrows

For some time there has been a mystery as to who the International Rosacea Foundation is. The IRF still says on its home page on the first line,

"The International Rosacea Foundation is a non-profit organization whose primary mission is to make available easy readable rosacea symptom and rosacea treatment information on one web site..." source

Here is the story of this mystery.

Michael Smith, Director of the International Rosacea Foundation in an email dated February 19, 2003 asked me to link to the IRF site.

I then checked it out and it is a comprehensive web site of information on rosacea and follows many of the basic categories as my commercial web site, but has a much more comprehensive list on the ingredients of rosacean non-prescription treatments. More important to me is the following statement in the LIFESTYLE RECOMMENDATIONS page:

"...Stimulants such as... excessive sugar from sweets and soda are vascular dilators and should be avoided. Sodas (soft drinks, pop) containing aspartame and or NutraSweet cause excessive redness in approximately 30% of rosacea sufferers and should be avoided....Rosacea redness is partially caused by high calorie carbohydrates (pastas, breads) and sugar spiking from all sweet foods...."

Finally a 'rosacea organization' has confirmed what I have been saying about sugar and rosacea since 1999.

I asked Mr. Smith what the policy of his organization is on spending and about the IRF agenda and so far have never gotten any response. The web site provides no names of directors, no contact information, no address, and only an email that sometimes bounces back to you. I have sent at least a half dozen emails to the IRF and have had no response whatsoever.

The owner of internationalrosaceafoundation.org according to a whois lookup on register.com is:

International Rosacea Foundation
44 Columbia St
Cambridge, MA 01139
phone 616 642-5048
Registrant Name: Andrew Fore
email: web@tresolini.org

Since February 2003 I have tried to find an address and phone number and what state this organization is registered in and it took Warren Stuart from the rosaceagroup.org to discover that the Better Business Bureau listed it with Bass & Boney and was notified of this in November 2004. So now there is evidence that the organization is listed by the BBB as a commercial website owned by Bass & Boney, Inc. Here is the evidence. Mr. Ralph Bass is the president of Bass & Boney, Inc. and a member of the Better Business Bureau which has kindly listed the International Rosacea Foundation along with Rosacea LTD-III and his other ventures. Do you think this solves the mystery? Personally I doubt it.

One more comment. It is interesting to note how the IRF web site is so much patterned after the same categories I orginally set up with my web site here. I do appreciate all the detailed information on non prescription products for rosacea and salute the IRF for all this research on what ingedients are in these products. However, my thought is that the IRF should finally come clean and come out of the closet and clear up the mystery as to who is running it with an address and email that works.