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Mark Zuckerberg donates $25m to Ebola aid fund
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are donating $25m to help fight Ebola.
The Facebook founder revealed today that the couple would be making the multi-million dollar donation to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation.
The CDC Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization that provides money to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which has launched 700 public health programmes around the world.
In a Facebook post Zuckerberg said he hoped his donation would help “the frontline responders in their heroic work.”
CDC currently has more than 100 staff deployed in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.
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.
Zuckerberg was named as the US’ top philanthropist in 2013 after a donation of 18m Facebook shares worth $970m (£590m) to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
According to the WHO’s latest estimates, over 4,447 people have died from 8,914 the latest Ebola outbreak.