Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook page that Priscilla (his wife) and him, will be donating $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation to help fight Ebola.
He goes on to say that:
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 e…nd 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.
We are hopeful this will help save lives and get this outbreak under control.
According to CDC, this donation will be used by the CDC Foundation to help expeditiously address needs that are identified by CDC experts on the ground, and that could otherwise go unmet. These needs may include the 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. This grant will also fund other needs that arise going forward.
In a similar vein, a group of celebrities came together to support the launch of and Ebola Survival Fund to support a coalition of community-based organizations working in Liberia and Sierra Leone in order to complement the efforts of the larger-scale programs being implemented by international organizations
Though these deaths are concentrated in West Africa, it has recently claimed its first victim in the US.
