Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan on their wedding day in May 2012
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged US$25m to the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) Foundation to help fight the spread of Ebola.
The United Nations said the world has 60 days from 1 October to get the Ebola outbreak under control or it faces a global health crisis.
To date, there have been almost 9,000 cases of Ebola reported in West Africa, resulting in 4,447 deaths.
“It is running faster than us, and it is winning the race,” said UN official Anthony Banbury.
“We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field,” Zuckerberg wrote on his personal Facebook page.
Providing context for what this money will provide, he added, “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.”
Early this year, Zuckerberg and Chan topped a list of the most generous philanthropists in the US after giving US$970m in Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest donation in the US in 2013.
