Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are donating $25 million to the CDC Foundation to help fight the Ebola epidemic.
In his facebook post, he wrote that the epidemic is “at a critical turning point.”
“Priscilla and I are donating $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation to help fight Ebola. The Ebola epidemic is at a critical turning point. It has infected 8,400 people so far, but it is spreading very quickly and projections suggest it could infect 1 million people or more over the next several months if not addressed.”
“It has infected 8,400 people so far, but it is spreading very quickly and projections suggest it could infect 1 million people or more over the next several months if not addressed,” he wrote. “We need to get Ebola under control in the near term so that it doesn’t spread further and become a long term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades at large scale, like HIV or polio.”
“We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome,” he continued. “Grants like this directly help the frontline responders in their heroic work. These people are on the ground setting up care centers, training local staff, identifying Ebola cases and much more. We are hopeful this will help save lives and get this outbreak under control.”
The donation will go to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Ebola response effort in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and in other spots in the world where Ebola is a threat, the foundation said Tuesday.
Zuckerberg and Chan are making the grant from their fund at the nonprofit Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
