Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating $25 million US dollars (€19.7 million) to the CDC Foundation to help address the Ebola epidemic.
The donation will provide “flexible funding allowing CDC to address the most pressing needs as the epidemic shifts and evolves,” Charles Stokes, president and chief executive of the CDC Foundation, said in the statement. The grants will benefit frontline responders who are setting up care centers, training staff in Africa and identifying Ebola cases.
“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,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post today.
“We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome,” he added.
The grant follows a $9 million donation made by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen last month.
Mr Zuckerberg and Ms Chan are making the grant from their fund at the non-profit Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
The number of Ebola cases in West Africa will exceed 9,000 this week and the epidemic is still spreading in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the World Health Organisation says.
