CAIRO: Sudan’s already troubled health sector faces the risk of “disaster” after more than two weeks of heavy fighting have rocked the poverty-stricken country, a UN World Health Organization official warns.
Even before the deadly conflict broke out on April 15, “the healthcare system in Sudan faced numerous crises... and was extremely fragile,” Ahmed al-Mandhari said, WHO regional director for the eastern Mediterranean.
Now — with hospitals bombed, medicines running low and many doctors fleeing the country — “it is a disaster in every sense of the word,” he said, warning of the growing threat of cholera, malaria and other diseases.
The battles raging in Sudan have pitted the Sudanese Armed Forces led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces of his deputy turned rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
More than 500 people have been killed and nearly 5,000 injured, according to official figures, but the real toll is feared to be much higher.
Only 16 per cent of Khartoum’s hospitals are now fully functional, al Mandhari said, and there is a “real shortage in medical staff... especially specialised medical staff, for example in surgery and in anaesthesia”.
The most vulnerable include about four million sick or pregnant women and 50,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition who will no longer receive vital care, he added.
The humanitarian tragedy will likely worsen in a country where 16 million people are already in need of aid to stave of famine.
The UN had until Monday suspended its work in Sudan after five aid workers were killed in the fighting.
The violence also forced the aid group Doctors Without Borders to stop almost all its activities in West Darfur — a region still scarred by a war that erupted in 2003 and left at least 300,000 dead, according to UN figures.
Sudan’s healthcare system is in need of “hundreds of millions of dollars” to address a situation that both predated and resulted from the current crisis, he said.
Amid the continued fighting, he warned of doctors opting to flee the country alongside tens of thousands of other Sudanese seeking safer shores.
UK evacuation flights airlifted more than 2,000 citizens from Sudan, including about 20 doctors who wanted to leave the war-wracked country. Regional powers have joined negotiations to help end the violence. — AFP
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