Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have just donated $25 million to the CDC Foundation in hopes of helping to fight the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. According to the Economic Times, 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.

Zuckerberg and Chan are said to be making the grant from their fund at the nonprofit Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Zuckerberg recently posted on Facebook that he thinks the epidemic is "at a critical turning point," further explaining his reasons for making the donation.

USA Today reports Zuckerberg's post as follows: "[Ebola] 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...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... 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 Economic Times reports that the World Health Organization has said West Africa could see up to 10,000 new Ebola cases a week within two months and confirmed that the death rate in the current outbreak is now 70 percent. As of now, the disease has killed more than 4,000 people, nearly all of them in West Africa. The WHO has called the outbreak "the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times."

 Zuckerberg's grant follows a $9 million donation made by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen last month, and hopefully more donations from other influential people and programs will follow.