Behind Alternate Life Saving

I have a confession to make.

I was nominated for the ALS ice bucket challenge.

And I just didn't care.

Don't get me wrong. I promise I will donate when I get back to the UK. (It's not very polite to donate money you didn't earn, i.e. your parents' salary.)

I'm just saying that, in my opinion, ALS ice bucket challenges are overly overhyped.

Let's face the facts:

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ALS - or also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, affects 1.2-4.0 out of 100,000 people globally yearly.

And now we look at two other neurodegenerative diseases:

Parkinson's: 300 per 100,000 persons in industrialised countries
Alzheimer's: 400 per 100,000 persons globally

Meanwhile, we discover that the ALS ice bucket challenge raised a whopping $112.4 million. With just that ONE challenge.

While years of donations and funding to the other two diseases have led to:

Parkinson's: NPF has funded more than $180 million in research and support services
Alzheimer's: NIH funds $480 million yearly on Alzheimer's research

Considering 28% goes to research, about $31 million will be spent for ALS research. But even after this conversion, we can see that the money flow is disproportionate to the prevalence of cases in the world.

Now, this might be due to a variety of reasons.

One would be that ALS is more life damaging than the other degenerative diseases. You hear stories about how ALS affects people even when they are in their early 20s, and you feel as if it is apitiful waste. But does that give us a reason to put aside the larger population of elders with other neurodegenerative diseases? They built us up; are we gonna abandon them?

Forgive me for sounding heartless, but it is, indeed, a delicate balance.

Another possibility is that the ALS foundation employs really smart people. They know how to communicate with this tech savvy world. They know that people nowadays are attention-seeking, social creatures. And they appealed to it, just like the plague of Facebook game notifications.

But I am not donating to them.
I do not actually have qualifications to say stuff like this.

And I am short of cash to freely donate.

So here's what I will do.

I will pledge to donate blood at least twice this year.

It is needed.
It is life-saving.
And more-importantly, it is mine to give.

I'm surprised no one thought of a blood bucket challenge yet.

.......

Ah. That's why.

Cya at the blood donation drive!