Mark Zuckerberg gives $25M to fight Ebola

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are giving $25 million to the CDC Foundation to help fight the Ebola epidemic.

In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg said the viral outbreak 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," he wrote. "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," he continued. "Grants like this directly help the front-line responders in their heroic work. These people are on the ground setting up care centers, training local staff, identifying Ebola cases and much more."

The donation will go to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Ebola response effort in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and in other spots in the world where Ebola is a threat, the foundation said Tuesday.

Zuckerberg and Chan are making the grant from their fund at the non-profit Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

In 2013, Zuckerberg and Chan set a record for charitable donations by giving Facebook shares worth nearly $1 billion to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

A year earlier, he and Chan gave the same number of shares, then worth about $500 million, to the foundation.

Zuckerberg has a net worth of about $29.7 billion. He has pledged to donate at least half his wealth to philanthropic causes.

In 2013 he was the largest donor to charity.

But his is not the largest donation from a tech titan to fight Ebola. Last month, Bill Gates's foundation pledged $50 million to fight the epidemic in West Africa.

Zuckerberg and Chan recently gave $120 million to Bay Area schools. In 2010, Zuckerberg donated $100 million to New Jersey schools.

Chan, a graduate from UCSF medical school, is currently a pediatric resident.