Thanks for the challenge Liz, I am calling out my Dear Piper, the Wolverines family and Renee Bell. ALS was first found in 1869 by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, but it wasn’t until 1939 that Lou Gehrig brought national and international attention to the disease . amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually leads to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed. Most commonly, ALS strikes people between the ages of 40 and 70, and as many as 30,000 Americans have the disease at any given time. Well, here’s the good news for those of you who have donated to ALS charities in the wake of the Ice Bucket Challenge: According to CharityNavigator, which evaluates nonprofits, at least some of your fellow new donors are taking the time to learn more about the disease and the organizations that help fight it. Page views on its site for the ALS Association, the main charity behind the campaign, are up to 16,000 for the first 17 days of August, an 8,500% increase compared to the same period last year, reports. LEARN more and Donate Www.alsa.org
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 00:51:24 +0000