Facebook co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and wife Priscilla Chan have just announced, via a Facebook post, that they have made a grant of $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation in support of fighting Ebola.
Ebola, a deadly virus, which started making inroads through Africa, has already infected close to 8,000 people, and a cure is still to be found. Zuckerberg, in his Facebook post, said,
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, 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.
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.
Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan who is a paediatrician, are among the biggest philanthropists in Silicon Valley. Their total donations, amount to a staggering $1 Billion, most of them going to healthcare and educational institutions.
As per recent statistics from the World Health Organisation, the deadly virus has claimed 4,447 lives from a total of 8,914 infected cases.
