It's been very celebrity-orientated and it plays into our culture of putting everything about ourselves out there on social media. Some people have chosen to do it in a bikini, some have chosen white T-shirts, some people have obviously done it to raise their profile and that's up to them. Personally it makes me a bit uncomfortable, but actually the bottom line is that people weren't talking about MND two months ago, and now they are."
A crude measurement can be found in Google searches. Searches for both ALS and Lou Gehrig's Disease, an alternative name in the US, rose sharply from 13 August to a peak on 21 August. Since then they have been declining. The term MND rose sharply from 20 August, reaching a peak on 26 August.
From 1 August to 27 August this year, the ALS Wikipedia page had 2,717,754 views. This compared with the 1,662,842 people who had visited the page during the whole of the preceding 12 months, according to data company Dataviz.