Remember: the Ice Bucket Challenge was in 2014. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Johnny Hallyday … The biggest celebrities have given in to the trend: pouring a bucket of ice water over their head, posting the video on the internet, then designating someone via social media to do the same.
The objective of the challenge? Raise awareness among the general public about an unrecognized disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Also called “Charcot’s disease”, ALS currently affects between 5,000 and 7,000 people in France, and men are 1.5 times more affected than women.
This Saturday, November 25, 2017, Anthony Senerchia the man behind the Ice Bucket Challenge died after fighting for 14 years against his illness – he was 46 years old. It was thanks to his cousin’s wife that the challenge was able to emerge: by spilling a bucket of ice water on her head, she sought to reproduce the muscular disorders linked to the degeneration of motor neurons that characterizes ALS.
Ice Bucket Challenge: discovery of a gene linked to Charcot’s disease
During the summer of 2014, 17 million videos linked to the Ice Bucket Challenge were published on social networks, which raised $ 220 million (or 184 million euros) for medical research – associations thus raised 13 times more money in 8 weeks than during the whole of 2013.
In addition, the Ice Bucket Challenge allowed, in July 2016, a major scientific breakthrough: a new gene linked to the disease (NEK1, that’s its name) was discovered by American researchers. In short, a challenge far from being stupid!
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