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Photo: AP
Mark Zukerberg
Photo: AP

Facebook launches Ebola charity donation button

After Zukerberg and wife give $25 million to fight against deadly virus, Facebook joins fund raising efforts.

Facebook Inc said users would now have option to donate directly to various Ebola relief charities through a button at the top of their News Feeds.

 

 

Facebook users can donate to three charities - International Medical Corps, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and Save the Children - starting today, the company said on its website on Thursday. 

 

Mark Zukerberg (Photo: AFP)
Mark Zukerberg (Photo: AFP)

 

The social media company is also donating 100 terminals to provide internet and voice-calling access for aid workers to Ebola-hit areas such as Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

 

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in October he and his wife would donate $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation to fight Ebola.

  

The money will be used by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Ebola response effort in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and elsewhere in the world where Ebola is a threat, the foundation said Tuesday.

 

The grant follows a $9 million donation made by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen last month. Zuckerberg and Chan are making the grant from their fund at the nonprofit Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

 

"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 wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday. "We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome."

 

 

The Ebola outbreak has resulted in nearly 5,000 deaths in West Africa and nine cases treated in the United States since August.

 

 


פרסום ראשון: 11.06.14, 18:45
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