What Is The Ice Bucket Challenge?

Have you seen these videos on Facebook recently? You know, the ones that feature friends nominating other friends to dump freezing cold buckets of ice water on themselves. It has unfortunately started to gain a little bit of negative attention. Hopefully, people will see the good in this positive effort to bring awareness to a terrible disease.

First, An example of the #ALSIceBucketChallenge Video

Local Story Of Someone Affected Personally by #ALS

Post by Nicolina LaBella.

Nicolina LaBella, Utica

Let me just say that this viral campaign is nothing more than a way to get wild and crazy to make people talk about this terrible disease, not negatively, but so people can recognize the severity of this ailment.

So you know exactly what ALS the Disease is, I refer to our friends at WebMD:

ALS is an incurable, progressive degenerative neurological disorder. For reasons that are not understood, the nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement gradually deteriorate. As a result, muscles waste away, leading to paralysis and death, usually in two to five years.

Now do you recognize it? NO? Well maybe you've heard it been called Lou Gehrig's Disease. No matter what you call it, it's a terrible illness that claims an additional 5,000 people a year, usually people over the age of 40. So as your mother always used to say, "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all." Let's hope that this trend continues to grow and maybe through this campaign, the journey for a cure will be that much closer.