Trends travel fast, and taking the ice bucket challenge, serving as a way to raise awareness for ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or also Lou Gehrig’s disease) is a celebrity fad at the moment, which includes football stars like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Steven Gerrard and Mesut Ozil taking it head on.
It’s not quite clear how much pouring icy water on an exposed body helps out with research, but I guess it has something to do with more people hearing about it and donating money for research. Usually, the life expectancy once the disease is revealed in a body is somewhere between two and three years, but about 10% of ALS patients live up to 10 years with it. Stephen Hawking has been holding on with ALS for 45 years.
Not just current footballers took it head on: Michael Owen, known for his bits of wisdom on television these days and not for scoring goals, and also David Beckham, mostly known for being beautiful and rich, enjoying the retirement life, didn’t mind helping out the good cause by putting themselves at risk of catching a cold.