Steptember

Steptember is from 4 September to 28 September – People are asked to take the challenge of taking 10,000 steps a day to raise money for Cerebral Palsy. An event organised by Cerebral Palsy Alliance. 10,000 steps a day is the ‘healthy’ amount of steps to be taken a day. For an office worker alone it is incredibly difficult, given we sit alllll day.

Cerebral Palsy is a physical disability which affects the movement and posture of a person, its one of the many disability’s that have a varied spectrum. This means that most people experience the same disability but in very different ways. Cerebral means ‘of the brain’ and palsy means ‘affected with paralysis and involuntary tremors’.

Cerebral Palsy is caused by damage to the brain of the fetus either during the pregnancy or shortly after birth to the child. Some stats – CP is an incident of 1 in 500 births in Australia and there are approx. 34,000 people in Australia who have CP. I personally think that’s pretty high and quite noteworthy that we should know more about right?

So there is no one cause for CP for a lot of babies the cause remains unknown, a small percentage of cases it is caused due to complications of birth, again a quite unavoidable cause in a lot of instances. Cerebral Palsy can affect all limbs or two limbs, sometimes both legs and other times one side of the body. I have a little diagram below from Cerebral Palsy Alliance to explain a little.

If you want to find out more about Cerebral Palsy please follow the webpage above, also donate if you can. 5 October is World Cerebral Palsy day, remember to spread the word.