Mark Zuckerberg and Wife donate $25m to fight Ebola outbreak

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, who is a pediatrician, have donated $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation to aid in combating the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

In a Facebook post announcing the move, Zuckerberg said the current crisis is at a "critical turning point". The money will go to the CDC Foundation, a private, non-profit organization securing donations to help the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fight the epidemic in west Africa, which has claimed more than 4,000 lives.

“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,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook. “We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome.”

The US has led the global response effort, pledging aid, money and even military personnel. But health officials across the world are calling on the international community to step up the pace before the outbreak spirals too far out of control.


“The sooner the world comes together to help west Africa, the safer we all will be. There is a window of opportunity to tamp this down – the challenge is to scale up the massive response needed to stop this outbreak.”