ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

The Ice Bucket Challenge, also known as ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, has become a quite pop culture particularly in the United States. What is ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and why it is so popular around the world at present?

Rules for ALS Ice Bucket Challenge:

The invited is asked to either accept the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (dump a bucket of ice water onto their head) or donate $100 to help ALS research within 24 hours. Or they can do both the challenge and donating. After the invited finishes the Ice Bucket Challenge, he/she can invite the other three to challenge the ice water, and then upload his/her challenge video.

Goal of ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

To raise the awareness of the rare disease “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” and encourage the donations and funds to the research.

Famous participants

Celebrities in science, sports, and entertainment industry have participated in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and they are Microsoft builder Bill Gates, former CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer, Facebook CEO Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kobe Bryant, Taylor Swift, and Justin Timberlake, etc. Their participation is all about the charity.

Effects

Prior to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, people have the limited awareness of what ALS is. And with the launch of this charitable activity, there are more than 1.2 million challenge videos shared on Facebook and it has been mentioned for more than 2.2 million times on Twitter from July 29 to August 17.

After the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge went popular on the social media, we can see a soaring increase in public awareness and charitable donations.

Criticism

A number of people criticize that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge may cause health risk, increasing the blood pressure suddenly. People with high blood pressure, bronchitis and heart disease are not advised to take part in this kind of activity. Due to the ongoing drought, local officials in California criticized that the challenge is wasting water.