We all have been watching our news feeds on social media filling up with people dumping ice cold water onto their heads…  And at first, I bet some of us had no clue why this was happening. When you dig a little deeper, you would find out that this challenge is for a great cause, bringing awareness to a horrific disease called ALS or “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” and hopefully enough money for research to find a cure.

So what is ALS? ALS is Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. The motor neurons in your body travel from your brain to spinal cord to muscles through out your body. When someone has ALS, their motor neurons start to deteriorate and eventually are killed off by the disease.  When this happens in patients with ALS, the brain is unable to control or create function in muscle movements because those neurons are no longer present. In the later part of the disease, patients become totally paralyzed. 

We found some facts we thought we could share about ALS from the ALS Association website.

ALS is NOT contagious.

ALS is responsible for nearly 2 deaths per 100,000 population annually.

Approximately 5000+ people are diagnosed with ALS each year in the United States. 2 people per 100,000 and about as 30,000 Americans have the disease at any given time.

ALS can strike ANYONE.

For more facts visit http://www.alsa.org/about-als/facts-you-should-know.html 

So, Cornerstone was challenged by our owner Jay Collins.  The original challenge came from our office manager here to our sales director, lab manager and owner…But Jay wanted to put a little twist on the challenge.  With that, Jay offered for every participating employee in the ice bucket challenge he would donate $100.00 in their honor to ALS!!!  We had 20 participants!  That is $2000.00 from Cornerstone plus additional donations from the employees themselves!  The most important thing to us was the give and donate, raise awareness and HAVE FUN as a team!  Our video is below!  We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!  We have challenged, Rich Motto and his team at CadBlu, Roy Goldberg from Ivoclar, Judy Fishman at LMT magazine and Jimmy Glidewell and his team at GLIDEWELL Dental Lab.  We hope you accept the challenge and donate to this cause!

 BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!  ALS we wish you the best of luck and congratulate you on raising SO much money and awareness!!!