Jolie and Pitt give two million dollars to fight disease

September 16, 2008 01:34:04 PM

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Superstar couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have donated two million dollars to help children affected by AIDS and tuberculosis in Ethiopia, the nonprofit group Global Health Committee (GHC) announced Monday.

"The money will be used to create a center for AIDS and tuberculosis-affected children in the capital city of Addis Ababa, and to help establish a program to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis," said the GHC in a statement.

The clinic will be named after the couple’s three-year-old Ethiopian adopted daughter Zahara. It will be modeled after a similar health center in Cambodia, also funded by Pitt and Jolie.

"It is our hope when Zahara is older she will take responsibility of the clinic and continue its mission," said Pitt.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that almost a million children have been orphan by AIDS in Ethipia.

"Our goal is to transfer the success we have had in Cambodia to Ethiopia where people are needlessly dying of tuberculosis, a curable disease, and HIV/AIDS, a treatable disease," said Jolie, an Oscar-winning actress and goodwill ambassador for United Nations Children's Fund.

"The Jolie-Pitt gift will allow us to deliver care and ease the great suffering caused by TB and AIDS," said Anne Goldfeld, co-founder of GHC and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are raising six children together, twins Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, born in France this year, Shiloh, aged two, and adopted children Zahara, Pax from Vietnam and Maddox from Cambodia. The family resides for the most part in a sprawling estate in the south of France.

Ethiopia has the seventh-highest rate of tuberculosis disease in the world and an estimated 1.7 million people in the country are infected with HIV, according to the World Health Organization.