After reading this, you should donate $5-$10 to a good cause...

... and here's why.

Michael Strieb, recently diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease), needs our help so he can to continue to communicate with his family and friends.

Here are more details, from Rebecca Watson via Skepchick blog:

... By the time he arrived at the Skepchick party at TAM 7 in Vegas last year, he was confined to a wheelchair and used a computer to do most of his communicating.

Now he’s no longer able to speak or type. He’s an incredibly intelligent and kind person, and the world is better off when he can communicate. Now you can help him!

For $3,200 he can afford an eye gaze system to communicate with his family and friends. Other skeptics are fundraising to help him out. We can totally hit that, seeing as about 10,000 of you are reading this right now. Send a few dollars their way and feel good about greatly improving the life of a fellow rational human.

If we all pitch in a few bucks, $5, $10, $20, whatever you can spare, Michael will be back in touch with his loved ones in no time. A small price for such an invaluable gift.  Details on how you can help can be found here.

For more details about Michael (or if you have problems with the online donation form) see the comments section of Rebecca's post, and this post by Phil Plait on Discover's Bad Astronomy blog.

$32,000+ raised for Doctors Without Borders

About a month ago I wrote about how one DPR Jones had launched a campaign to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières (parent organization to Doctors without Borders) following the apparently fraudulent fund raising activities of YouTube evangelist VenomfangX.

DPR Jones and a number of others banded together just over a week ago, and hosted a 24 hour blogTV event that pulled in over $32,000 for this great organization - a fantastic accomplishment and one that did not go unrecognized... they got a personal "thank you" from the director of MSF in the UK:



A job well done, folks!!!

If you'd still like to contribute, I believe you can still donate via firstgiving.com through the end of 2009.

Donate to a good cause!

Most people have heard of Doctors Without Borders (the U.S. branch of the humanitarian-aid organization, Médecins Sans Frontières) but how many of us have contributed to their organization?

If you ever wanted to donate, here's your chance!



Following the apparently fraudulent fund raising activity of an evangelical YouTube user that goes by the name VenomFangX (who claimed to be raising funds for the The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario), user DPR Jones and others launched their own effort to do some real fund raising for the Sick Kids Hospital. Not stopping there, they took it one step further to try and raise money for Doctors Without Borders.

You can contribute to their campaign to raise $10,000 for Doctors Without Borders by donating through the website First Giving (per DWB's request).

No excuses folks, it takes less than a minute and the donation form is right here.

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Update

Over at ScienceBlogs, Orac has a couple of posts about the Sick Kids Hospital supporting complimentary and alternative medical treatments with an apparent disregard for the existing evidence against them. Hopefully feedback from the science and medical community can shift them away from their "neutral stance" on these matters to an "evidence based stance" that better serves their patients.