Why the Rare Diseases Become to Be a Challenge for Medicine of Today?

Rare diseases de!ned as conditions a"ecting less than 5:10,000 population (according to the de!nition used in European Union), refer to limited number of patients in Poland, Europe and in the USA, but the collective number of disorders is very large. Currently evaluated by Orphanet (the portal for rare diseases and orphan drugs, www. orpha.net) the number of identi!ed rare disease is over 7,000 and at least two new rare diseases are discovered and reported in the scienti!c literature each month. Poland has become a member of Orphanet since 2006 and nowadays Polish version of Orphanet website called Orphanet Poland is available and may be helpful not only for professionals (see article of Jezela et al).