Paul Allen donates $100M
— -- SEATTLE -- Billionaire Paul Allen, who owns the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers, has pledged to contribute at least $100 million to the fight against the deadly Ebola virus.
"We're faced with a huge challenge with Ebola," Allen told ESPN.com's Kevin Arnovitz on Friday night. "If you have one of these epidemics with the number of cases potentially doubling every 20 days, to get ahead of that and contain it, you have to send large numbers of health workers over to the affected areas, and get them in place and get communications going with communities. If the health workers get ill, they want to know they can get medevaced out of there. So we've been trying to do a few things, to build containers that can go on planes to help with the health workers evacuated.
"I'm just trying to help show the way that we need to really increase what we're doing now, because we're currently chasing the expansion of the disease, and we've got to get ahead of expansion."
The Microsoft co-founder said Thursday that among the initiatives he's supporting is the development of two medevac containment units that the U.S. State Department can use to safely evacuate health workers who become infected.
Allen said he's working with the World Health Organization to increase its capacity for handling the logistics of transporting international aid workers, and he's establishing a fund to help cover the costs of emergency transportation of the workers.
Money also will go to the University of Massachusetts Medical School to help provide decontamination and lab equipment to Liberian hospitals, as well as community outreach and education in Liberia.
"I think we've now seen that even something that's happening in West Africa, how it can arrive on our doorsteps very quickly," Allen told ESPN.com. "We're all interconnected in today's world."
Allen's foundation previously pledged $26.5 million.
ESPN.com's Kevin Arnovitz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
