Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Case Study

The Incident Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. This disease causes the brain to lose control of muscle movement and eventually leads to paralysis and death ("What Is ALS?," n.d.). College baseball player Pete Frates, who was diagnosed with ALS in March of 2012, came up with a way of spreading awareness of the disease (Gallo 2014). The challenge encouraged nominated participants to be filmed having a bucket of ice water poured over their heads and then nominating others to do the same. The nominated participants then would have 24 hours to complete the challenge or forfeit by donating to the ALS Association.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge really started to become very popular in the United States during the summer of 2014. This challenge amazingly went viral through multiple social media sites, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This challenge was grass-roots campaign driven; “it was passed from person to person through social networks as a mode of communication and gathered …show more content…
This challenge was criticized for several reasons, including concerns that people were focusing on the stunt rather than the donations and questions regarding the use of the donated funds. Animal rights group, PETA challenged whether or not the money that was being raised for this problem was going to be used correctly. Ingrid E. Newkirk, the president of PETA, suggested that money that was raised for the ALS Association was going to be used to run painful tests on animals. Newkirk then recommended that we should “donate to charities only listed on humaneseal.org” because those charities don’t fund animal experiments (Bedard 2014). This definitely can create an issue because when something for a cause goes viral you want to know where your money is