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Samsung
Samsung has offered hundreds of smartphones to some of the hardest-hit areas in West Africa to aid the fight against Ebola.
The company announced Tuesday that it will donate 3,000 Galaxy S3 Neo smartphones. The devices will be channeled through the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) and will make their way to 60 Ebola medical clinics in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
The Ebola epidemic, centered in those three countries, has infected more than 9,200 people, killing more than 4,500 of them, according to the CDC Foundation. The disease has also reached into the US and Europe in a handful of isolated cases, including several deaths, and with widespread media attention.
Last week, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with his wife Priscilla Chan, donated $25 million to the effort to contain Ebola, a viral disease for which there is as yet no vaccine.
When the Ebola medical clinics in West Africa receive the smartphones, they can install the UN’s Smart Health Pro application. According to Samsung, that app will provide medical staff with tools to treat patients and collect medical records. Quarantined patients can also place calls to families with the devices. The smartphones, which Samsung said altogether have a value of $1 million, will be destroyed once the outbreak has started to wind down.
Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
