Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg and wife donate $25million to fight Ebola

by Kolapo Olapoju

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of social media platform, Facebook, has announced a donation of $25 million(N4,106,250,000) to fight the deadly Ebola virus disease.

Zuckerberg, who has a fortune of over $30 billion made the announcement on Tuesday, 14 October, via his Facebook page, stating that he and wife, Priscilla will be donating the money to the Centre for Disease Control Foundation.
He wrote, “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.”

Zuckerberg also stated that it was pertinent to get the virus under control before it spirals out of control, to become a global health disaster.

“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 centres, training local staff, identifying Ebola cases and much more. We are hopeful this will help save lives and get this outbreak under control,” he added.

According to the Washington Post, Zuckerberg and Priscilla’s contributions were made through their fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and was made to the CDC Foundation’s Global Disaster Response Fund.

Culled from ynaija.com