Mark Zuckerberg, Wife Priscilla Chan Donated $25 Million To Help Fight Ebola

Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan Donated $25 Million To Help Fight Ebola 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife, Priscilla Chan donated $25 million to combat the fatal Ebola epidemic in Africa. This money was directly given to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) Foundation, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The survival fund was released Wednesday. It, also, featured Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Blair, and other popular, familiar faces that push for the establishment of community-based organizations that can work against the deadly virus that's spreading in all of Sierra Leone and Liberia.

CDC Foundation was established by the Congress to assist in the campaign of raising private funds to somehow augment the resources of the Foundation, especially when public health threats occur. Chan and Zuckerberg's contribution was made possible through their personal fund at the foundation of Silicon Valley Community, which was then transferred to the global disaster response fund of the CDC Foundation.

In Zuckerberg's Facebook post, he said "the current Ebola epidemic is humanity's critical turning point." He added, "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."

Personal grants such as this can directly help the responders, especially those in the frontline of this heroic work. These big-hearted people are working in the field training local personnel, setting-up care centers, and identifying more cases.

The grants are to used to help in the battle against the deadly Ebola in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea through financing equipment acquisition, trainings, transportation needs, burial supports, and tracing contacts that need medications immediately, according to Fast Company.

Tom Frieden, the CDC Director, said "The most important step we can take is to stop Ebola at its source. The sooner the world comes together to help West Africa, the safer we all will be." He added, "This significant contribution from Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan will help us rapidly advance the fight against Ebola."

While it's true that the US government is leading the global effort by pledging money, health officials all over the world like to make an appeal to the international community to speedup the assistance before everything gets out of proportion. 

 

 

 

 

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