Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan made a grant of $25 million from their donor-advised fund at Silicon Valley Community Foundation to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help to the fight against Ebola virus. The donation was granted to the CDC Foundation’s Global Disaster Response Fund.
“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,” wrote Zuckerberg in his Facebook timeline.
“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.”
The entrepreneur added that their grant is “is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome.”
“We are hopeful this will help save lives and get this outbreak under control,” concluded the businessman.
Zuckerberg is one of the richest men in the world with an estimated current net worth of 31.7 Billion Dollars, according with Forbes. The founder and CEO of Facebook and his wife are keen philanthropists, and were the U.S.’s biggest donors 2013 according to a list of publicly-available donations.
CDC has hundreds of employees working on containing Ebola will send 150 public health experts in the area where the virus has spread the most, including Liberia, Guinea and Sierra. The CDC Foundation are using their funding to help address needs that are identified by CDC experts on the ground, such as equipping of community care centers, employment and training of local staff, generators, vehicles to be used for specimen transport, Ebola case identification and contact tracing, burial support, and translation services and communications, all vital to health care system strengthening.
US health officials have stressed that the most effective way to prevent an Ebola outbreak in their country is to control the virus at its source. So far, there have been two people diagnosed in the US. The first was Liberian national who contracted Ebola when visiting his country and then died of it in Dallas, and a nurse who helped care for him.
The number of cases of Ebola in West Africa could reach 9,000 this week, as the epidemic continues to expand geographically in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, according with the World Health Organization (WHO).
So far, the death toll from the outbreak reached 4,447 of a total of 8,914 cases of people infected with confirmed cases Spain and the United States.
Through: Facebook, CDC Foundation, NBC News, CNN Mexico
